Still, it’s a downer. If the World Series were only played during one week in fall and torrential rains made games impossible, it would sucketh big time. So I’m depressed about it.

Here are my several cents.

1. It’s extraordinarily hard to write a good book, not to mention a great one.

2. It’s unlikely that an extraordinary book will get the recognition it deserves, especially in its day.

Consider that none of Don DeLillo’s first five books sold a lick, or that next to no one read Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree upon its publication (a book which took him twenty years to write, mind you, and is a towering work of genius). Moby Dick was considered a titanic failure after the commercial success of Melville’s South Pacific memoir, Typee. Emily Dickinson was never published in her lifetime. Alice Munro hasn’t won the Nobel Prize. Nor has Haruki Murakami. Or Cormac McCarthy, or Philip Roth, or Don DeLillo. DeLillo, by the way, didn’t win a Pulitzer (though he was a finalist for Underworld). James Salter’s never gotten a whiff of any of these grand awards, and people, I’m here to tell you, you’ve never read a book as great as Light Years (if you haven’t read it yet), or A Sport and a Pastime, or his astonishing memoir—he calls it a recollection—Burning the Days. And there is so much I haven’t read and not included here, not to mention hundreds of examples I’m leaving out.

3. Awards are arbitrary.

In 1961, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer—a lovely book—won The National Book Award, beating out Yate’s Revolutionary Road. Both went on to write many books afterward, one between periods of clarity in the fog of chronic alcoholism, despair, and relative anonymity while the other was crowned the post-modern king of Southern letters. In another universe, Yates anticipated Mad Men and Percy only wrote one good book.

3a. Luck is blind.

4. Kafka begged Brod to burn his manuscripts before his death. Brod did not honor his request. Thus we have the Kafkaesque.

4a. X, the greatest author you’ve never heard of, whose novel, Y, is the greatest novel ever written, had a friend, Z, who, unlike Brod, honored his friend’s deathbed wish, and burned Y.  Though I’m not certain this has happened, it is highly likely to have occurred.

5. To the winner go the spoils.

5a. The three non-winners will divide the non-spoils, i.e., a big bump in sales.

5b. Except for Foster Wallace, who is beastly dead.

5c. His novel, I might add, was not completed.

5d. The easiest way to finish a novel is to have someone else do it for you, whether you’re dead or alive.

5e. A novella is a short novel. A novel is a long narrative.

6. America loves winners.

7. Literature is not a spectator sport.

7a. Neither is it an agon or a competition.

8. In the past two weeks there’s been a whole lot of talk about books. A good thing.

9. Less is less, to quote the great Stanley Elkin, more is more, and enough is enough.

10. Nobody likes a list that ends on 9.

Unfortunately, the subsequent din has, to a degree, crowded out the finalists’ achievement, which is getting to this penultimate stage. No small feat when you consider the excellence and luck required just to make it through the jury’s winnowing. It was telling—in no way the fault of Patchett or Grossman, but during the News Hour interview certainly telling—that only at the end of the story were the finalists finally mentioned, yet another way this cacophonous world of instantaneous response and comment blares over art, which, more often than not, is slowly produced and is also to be consumed thus.

And the Winner Isn’t…Novak Djokovic

Tennis fans’ eyes were on the Monte Carlo Masters last week, to my mind the most beautiful tournament location on the ATP. My wife, during her junior year abroad, passed Monte Carlo’s seaside country club on a moped, looked out over the cliffs, the Bedouin hospitality tents, the red clay courts—all of it framed by the sea—and thought: This is luxury. Next to Madrid’s Magic Box, the camera cutaways to the crowd, decked out and beautiful, sipping Kir Royales and living their Olympian lives, are unrivaled. So is Nadal here; he’s won the thing an unprecedented seven straight times.

He won again last Sunday, demolishing Djokovic 3 and 1. Yes, Novak’s gramps died. We’re sorry for your loss, sir, but it didn’t seem to bother you as you stormed back against both Dolgopolov and Berdych from a set down in the previous rounds and, let’s face it, if you choose to compete you must take your licks without excuses: a W’s a W, an L and L. Did the match tell us anything about the current state of their rivalry? Has Nadal righted the ship given his recent seven-match losing streak to the Djoker?

Nadal will never again dominate against this man, that’s for sure. Novak is simply too good at this point; he’s also tasted too much blood; he knows now how beat Nadal—how to beat everyone, for that matter. But the great rivalries have ebbs and flows, are often characterized by runs, periods of ascendancy (see: Borg/Mac). Tennis is a game of adjustments, after all, and despite the fact that Novak’s level was down a notch due to death of Grandpapa, a thumping it was nonetheless, the lopsided score demonstrating just how high a level he has to maintain to beat Rafa, let alone play with him. But it also was a study in the Spaniard’s adjustments to his nemesis’s game and a demonstration of what he’s learned from his losses, particularly at the Australian Open, where, it seemed to me, he finally got to a point where he realized he could beat the Serb again.

First and foremost, Nadal served both aggressively and at a very high percentage, moving the ball around the box like a pitcher: he had clutch pop and consistency. On balance, his depth was terrific during the rallies and he took Djoker’s speed from him, often going up the middle, forcing Djoker to create angles. Most interestingly, I thought, was Nadal’s willingness to go to Djokovic’s backhand (the Serb’s lethal weapon) and up the line with his own—a complete surprise to me and, clearly, to his opponent. All told, these tactics were subtle pattern changes that fretted Novak’s usually remarkable anticipation. Combine these nanosecond hesitations with Monaco’s slow clay, so similar in pace to the French Open’s, and they blunted every aspect of Novak’s game, giving Nadal that much more time over the course of the match to dictate. And so on we go to Barcelona. It will be a great spring for tennis.

And the Winner Is…Gary Shteyngart

I had the pleasure of appearing with Gary Shteyngart at Washington, DC’s Folger Shakespeare Library last week, a double thrill for me because its new director, Mike Witmore, is one of my best friend’s from Vassar, the guy I bounced my earliest writing off of, and so reading under his roof (and Willy the Shake’s) was, for me, a coming-full-circle and a gigantic thrill. Plus I got access to the library’s vault and saw the folios, Queen Elizabeth’s signature and, no shit, her girdle. Make that a triple thrill, by the way. Slate’s Hanna Rosin, whose work I greatly admire, moderated.

On stage, Shteyngart is electric, hysterical, polyphonic, hyper-associative—he knocked back some kickass chocolate before we went on—Robin Williams if he were a Russian Jew with literary talent. I’d read Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart’s most recent novel, the week before, and not only thoroughly enjoyed it but also had it enter my dreams. (In my dystopian nightmare, my children put on a play of Game of Thrones for me, but their imaginations, they claimed, were incapable of working without their iPads. My kids don’t have iPads, FYI; they also don’t watch Game of Thrones.) It was also revelatory to hear Shteyngart read aloud—he picked the great dinner scene in the novel when Lenny Abramov takes his beloved, the young Korean Eunice Park, to meet his parents. I’d suggest to readers unfamiliar with his work to perhaps sample an audio of the novel before reading it, because it only adds layers to his satire because the various voices tell us so much about American culture, and his vision of post-literate United States is at once funny and disturbing and, I fear, here now.

Thoughts? Feelings? Feedback? Write me at adamrosswrites@gmail.com.

You won’t catch me watching the Indian Wells men’s final between Federer and Isner. My boy Nadal was knocked out by Fed last night, 3 and 4, a rain-delayed match played in swirling, comparatively cold conditions that recalled Fed’s five-set, two-day long, U.S. Open quarterfinal victory against Andre Agassi in 2000-whenever. Props to Fed, though; commentators got it wrong before both these matches: Nadal’s high-percentage spin and Agassi’s training in windy Vegas were for naught. It was Fed who was not only more adaptable but also more aggressive, his supreme footwork on display. Crazy wind’s always a factor but generally Fed moves so fluidly to the ball it’s as if he’s not playing in the same wind as his opponent, and his willingness to accept the tough conditions refutes Mats Wilander’s assertion that he’s not a fighter, or mentally tough. Of course he is. And when Nadal lifted his game in the first set to level things a 3–3, Fed was there to kick him back down the ladder; when the Spaniard awoke at 2–5 in the second and he started to roll again, Federer lay out a speed bump. Match. The great points were scintillating and the Swiss seems committed to flattening out his crosscourt backhand whenever Nadal cheats to his own forehand side. Has Fed welded the chinks in his armor? With the Big Three playing at this level, the French Open could be truly extraordinary.

Still, the match of the tournament for me was Isner’s win against Djokovic. His gargantuan gifts aside, there’s no greater pleasure in sport than to see a game plan perfectly executed and unquestionably Nadal could learn a lot about how to beat Djoker from this match. We’ll forget Isner’s inimitable, freakish serve, which is absurd in all sorts of ways (angle, pace, consistency, bombs delivered by a guy with a great pitcher’s canniness and a kicker that, twice, jumped over Djoker’s head) and concentrate, instead, on his unflinching commitment to 1) an aggressive return of serve 2) a willingness to come into net whenever he hurt Novak and 3) a willingness to crack forehands whenever the opportunities presented themselves. In short, he played a perfect match. And then Fed thumped him in straights. What a time to be a pro. What a greedy bunch are Fed and Nadal and, now, Djoker. Thirty-seven Grand Slam titles between the three of them, and there’s the Gentle Giant, trying to get his. My heart goes out to him.

My heart goes out to Maria Sharapova, too, who must look across the net at Victoria Azarenka and see an opponent who does almost everything better than her except maybe serve, and it’s been a long, long time since Maria has controlled a match against a top player with that shot. In the final, Az seemed to have all day to find open court, not that she needed it. With the possible exception of Kim Clijsters, no one in the women’s game redirects the ball better. I said it’s a great pleasure to see a game plan perfectly executed; a close second is to see great talent fully realized and I couldn’t help but think about Az in Oz several years ago, a set up against Serena having nearly blown her off the court in two, when suddenly the pressure mounted, the heat went to her will and psyche, and suddenly she was stumbling around like she’d been shooting vodka on the changeovers and ultimately had to retire from dizziness. I’ll make a bold prediction: if Az stays healthy, I swear, she’ll win The Grand Slam this year. I don’t even think either of the Williams sisters could play with her at this level.

*

It has been a terrible reading year for me so far—I’m talking sheer numbers—this having nothing to do with the quality of the books I’ve tackled. Thoroughly enjoyed Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and would have followed that exuberant Geek-Spanglish voice anywhere. Re-read Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned before hearing him read/speak at Vanderbilt. The man can write a sentence and is a complete gentleman in person. I’ve already mentioned Alix Ohlin’s upcoming Signs and Wonders, a wonderful story collection by a writer who combines quicksilver storytelling ability, sheer narrative dexterity, with an almost spooky emotional intelligence. Am currently slogging through Mann’s The Magic Mountain (there’s a movie?). Got no gripes with Mann, by the way. It’s amazing how he anticipates Thomas Friedman’s flat world, for instance:

“Technical progress [Settembrini] said, gradually subjugated nature, by developing roads and telegraphs, minimizing climatic differences; and by the mean of communication which it created proved itself the most reliable agent in the task of drawing together the peoples of the earth, of making them acquainted with each other…”

But all my energy has been going into my novel, Playworld, and I’m fried by day’s end. Have made some real breakthroughs after several months of blind alleys and dead ends. Some moments of deep despair. Writing: You need serious guns to do it. Also Stephen Colbert’s sense of humor. At the suggestion of Jedi-master (and stupendous novelist and short story writer) Steve Yarbrough, I did, however, read Alice Munro’s much anthologized story “Carried Away” from Open Secrets. Dear Tolstoy: Eat your heart out. Any fans of her work should read her Paris Review interview: she’s a pure writing animal. I have inside information that her new collection, due out this spring or summer, is remarkable.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What’s better anyway, Vernon? To have the Devil in me, or to have it be me alone?”

And this:

Vernon crossed the room and crawled from the shimmering cavern…pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.

At left, meanwhile, Companhia Das Letras’s (Brazil) fantastic Mr. Peanut cover, incorporating the book’s mysterious murder/suicide and a Mobius band.

Finally, from Chapter 16, an essay of mine adapted from my commencement address to Harpeth Hall’s Class of 2011. It’s in praise of failure.

Looking back, it was, more than anything else, a great reading year and, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d share my list, an addendum to the Year in Reading piece I wrote for The Millions (check out that series when you have the chance). I’ll begin with what will probably be the last book I’ll have finished this year, unless I’m somehow fortunate enough to get Alan Heathcock’s much-acclaimed Volt under my belt. That was James Salter’s Light Years, which I can’t recommend highly enough. It astonished and moved me more than any book has in quite some time and is inarguably a masterpiece. If you haven’t discovered Salter, put Light Years or A Sport and a Pastime at the very top of your list for 2012. You won’t be disappointed.

Here goes:

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (I read this twice)

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

The Letters of Saul Bellow edited by Benjamin Taylor

The Oregon Experiment by Keith Scribner

The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes

The Stories of John Cheever

The Journals of John Cheever

Tiger, Tiger by Margaux Fragoso

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

On Being Blue by William Gass (a re-reading)

Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Dusk and Other Stories by James Salter

The Curfew by Jesse Ball

Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right by Dominic Sandbrook

What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President? by Kevin Mattson

Live from New York: A History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller

End Zone by Don DeLillo (a re-reading)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Project X by Jim Shepard

Like You’d Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

First Love by Ivan Turgenev (I don’t know, fifth or sixth time reading it)

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (it’s coming out this year and I blurbed it—a total ball)

A Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris by Eric Blau

A Separate Peace by John Knowles (a re-reading)

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov (maybe sixth time I’ve read it)

One resolution for 2012: Read more.

Finally, in Ladies and Gentlemen news, the collection was named a top book of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle and The Book Lady.

Enjoy these last days of 2011.

Meanwhile, here, left, is the Piper’s cover for Ladies and Gentlemen (very cool) along with a terrific UK review of the collection in The List (it’s published by Cape there next month).

Some other stuff: my piece for the great Year in Reading Series for The Millions as well as one in Tin House about Parnassus, Nashville’s new independent bookstore. Finally, a very flattering article about Ladies & Gentlemen from Chapter16, which, I’m flattered to add, was a year-end, best-of pick by Three Guys One Book.

More soon.

Reclamation, by definition, is the taking back of a wasteland for cultivation and all around us, it seems, the earth is scorched. Our country’s finances are a wasteland and so is our government. The Super Committee can’t seem to do its job, can’t arrive at a compromise, although you and I do it every day at home or at work. This committee exists because Congress couldn’t do its job. The punters punt to punters, Democrats to Republicans and back, for over three decades, with a nifty assist from our friends on Wall St. And so here we are.

The earth’s on its way to being a wasteland. Consider, for instance, Antarctica and what it tells us about the state of the planet and how climate change shadows the rise in carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution or that last year was, once again, the hottest year on record. (But let’s say you don’t buy any of this scientific mumbo-jumbo, this highfalutin hokum dreamed up by tree huggers and liberals, by commie/progressive tax-and-spenders, even though you’ll take it as law when you, say, fly a plane or drive your car or take your Plavix or have triple-bypass surgery. My counter-argument is something like French philosopher Blaise Pascal’s gambit. Remember that from Intro Philosophy? Better, he argued, to convert to Christianity, even if you don’t believe, rather than risk spending eternity in hell. Better to live sustainably, I say, to put your muscle behind a Green World, than wait for definitive proof of manmade causes of climate change, since the possible alternative is no world at all.)

In The Great Reclamation, you vote with your vote and your pocketbook. Apply its logic to anything. Here’s an example: If you need a book, you call Parnassus and order it by phone and pick it up the next time you’re in Green Hills because you believe it’s important that nationally recognized authors have a place to share their work in Nashville. Because when you book shop, you’d rather talk to an informed human being who lives and breathes literature or mystery or nonfiction than be offered recommendations based on statistical analyses of your buying habits. Because, really, who the fuck needs a book RIGHT NOW any more than you need your whole library with you everywhere you go. Because you chose the red pill instead of the blue pill. Because on a plane you can keep reading a tree book during takeoff and landing and on the beach can drop it in the sand without major damage. Because you like page numbers and not percents. Because contrary to what some might say, the environmental impact of e-readers is more deleterious than tree books. Because when you read the notes in the margins of your book, the scribblings you penned a decade or two ago, you get a sense of the ways you’ve changed and grown and remain the same. Because serendipity is part of life’s magic and is more likely to occur when you go somewhere without a clue as to what you’re looking for and it finds you and feels as if it were fated. Because time, in this overscheduled hyper-active world, is to be wasted and to do so is a reclamation thereof and a rebellion against thoughtless, tyrannical efficiency.

Because.

*

In Ladies and Gentlemen news, I appeared on the Bookrageous podcast Episode 29. Our topic: short stories. The conversation was a hell of a lot of fun and features this month’s Garden & Gun pinup girl, Richmond, VA’s Rebecca Schinsky, also known as The Book Lady. Meanwhile, watch for my posts on the ATP finals. As I write this, Tsonga and Fed are warming up for their match. E-readers I can take or leave but not my DVR.

painful, at times, to watch, really excruciating to behold, because the physical toll on both players was evident as the third set came to its thunderous conclusion, so that this seemed less a tennis court then a coliseum, a to-the-death affair, and when Rafa took the third there was an expression of disbelief on Nole’s face that honestly warmed this weekend hacker’s heart…My inner Mother Teresa wants to upbraid the USTA for destroying the very players who line its pockets. My inner sadist would’ve liked to watch either emerge from bed this morning. I’m picturing the opening scene of North Dallas Forty without the Quaaludes and pot.

And look at Nole since: he made a feeble attempt to play Davis Cup, retiring with the same back injury suffered during his Balboa match with Rafa, one which in turn sidelined him for nearly eight weeks total. He managed, next, to win a couple at the Paris Indoors only to withdraw because of a shoulder injury, a sure sign of coming back too soon. Was he rope-a-doping to collect that million plus Masters Series check? Wouldn’t you? But he certainly competed against Troicki and didn’t have to. Has he been the same player since the Open? Was George Foreman after The Rumble in the Jungle? Does the USTA give a shit? Do the players really protest? No. Why? Greed all around, the same thing that happens to short story writers who make it big.

Federer, meanwhile, has been doing the late-career-Agassi thing, mopping up the comers, the twenty-somethings, making tennis prognosticators look bad. Like Hopkins or DeNiro, the dude still kicks some ass. He won Basel (again) although admittedly his competition was thin. Does he play top level talent a non-appearance fee? Are USTA players like, “Meh, Basel. Such an ugly and dirty ceety! I will skeep!” Next he thumps Gasquet, Berdych, and Tsonga on his way to win the Paris Indoors–and those last two players had been giving him fits in 2011. (Though I will say of the final that Tsonga played very poorly in his 1–6, 6–7 (1) thumping and will also add that Federer was sure, this time around, to keep his foot firmly planted on Ali Jr’s neck during the match, proving an old dog can still learn.) What does the 2012 season look like? I’ll reserve making that forecast till after the season-ending finals but stick by my leading observation in my previous post: men’s tennis still belongs to Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and sometimes Murray.

*

In Ladies and Gentlemen news, the story collection was just named one of Kirkus Reviews Top Books of 2011 and if you want to hear a fun interview, check out my appearance on John Seigenthaler’s A Word on Words. I had the honor of appearing with novelist and short story master Jim Shepard at Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books (if you haven’t read his National Book Award-nominated Like You’d Understand, Anyway, get it and get a life). Even cooler, he and BookTalk’s Stephen Usery joined me at my house for beers afterward. Other SFofB highlights: meeting Justin Torres (We the Animals) and Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding). Harbach’s plenty nice but a bit stingy. I asked him for fifty grand to buy a pack of smokes. He said he was sorry. He only had ten thousand bucks in his wallet.

*

As for my failure to blog, I’ve been working on a new novel, Playworld, doing research and drafting, the latter mostly reconnaissance, which has produced plenty of writing that may never end up on the printed page, like this paragraph:

My aunt always seemed to be smiling, which pressed her high cheekbones into her eyes and made her dimples cartoonishly discrete, so that her face reminded me of a Seuss character. She was short—not overweight but stocky, not fat but wide around—and when she wore a tube dress, as she was now, the skirt hung like a lampshade over her legs and made her head appear smaller, an effect heightened because her hair was bobbed, so that her body had the shape of cake stand’s glass dome. It was a rare thing to see her as dressed up as she was; I recalled a Christmas party or two and a wedding. Her default outfit was always some shade of housecoat, and she stood legless, like a Weeble, behind her kitchen’s bar, for she was always cooking for her three children, a thing she did with great command and limitless patience, as my cousins rarely arrived at these meals together. To see her clothed thus engendered a deep and complicated feeling of sympathy toward her, because her formalwear appeared dated, were the same, in fact, as the outfits I identified in the framed pictures that hung on her walls taken at long-ago family gatherings, or that I saw in documentaries of the Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King assassinations—there was something pearl-and-cat-eye-glasses about them. It made me root for her. Where was her Prince Charming? (It wasn’t my fat Uncle Marco, whose ties were always loose at his neck.) Where was her fairy godmother? And yet, I’d occasionally catch her reveling in her underdog status, using it as cover, usually when she joined my cousins and me at games, Monopoly or Life but especially Scrabble, the last at which she was demonically good, a wizard at plinking a tile on the square we’d all thought boxed into uselessness, a play that activated branches of words and was followed by some serious math (which she’d already tabulated and subsequently crosschecked), a move she always pretended to accidentally discover—“Look-ee here,” she’d say—as if it weren’t an ambush all along. She didn’t fool me and seemed to recognize this when we were alone, and I loved her ruses and excesses and was annoyed by them in turn; they reminded me of her stories, which went on forever and gathered toward A Moral but made inspired detours, full of wicked asides, usually about family members. (“Your Aunt Madge, you may have noticed, begins the evening dangerous as a snake and ends it quivering like a jellyfish.”) Here, however, our roles were reversed. She was my charge, somehow, and I was suddenly afraid in her presence: not only of her good-spiritedness, which was bulletproof, but also the fact that she was impervious to embarrassment, which caused it to ricochet, and so I fixed my gaze on her black dress shoes, waiting for the blow.

Does this constitute a coming attraction? Who knows? Not me. And I’m writing the goddamn thing.

More soon.

(BTW, I stand with Mary Carillo about these pow-wows: I’m tired of the incessant illegal coaching consultations Murray, Djoker, and Nadal engage in. Not only should the USTA enforce the rule but Fed is by a mile the grownup of the bunch in this regard. The match is a test, he’s been quoted as saying. On court, your coach can’t help you. Amen, Your Excellency.)

Now to the final: Generally speaking, it was a brutally academic affair, a Serbian-run clinic, really, in A. The Power of Court Positioning and B. A Study Guide to Beating Nadal. All of Djoker’s finals with Nadal have been that this year, but the thrills this match supplied arose, in part, from Rafa’s determination to fight this losing battle start to finish, and I defy any tennis fan to find a match in recent memory played at this pace, at such a blur—Weirding-Way tennis for you Dune geeks—with so many haymakers thrown you’d think Stallone had scripted it, with boggling gets that were also miracle replies to arrow-shot approaches unlike anything I’ve ever seen; a contest that was painful, at times, to watch, really excruciating to behold, because the physical toll on both players was evident as third set came to its thunderous conclusion, so that this seemed less a tennis court then a coliseum, a to-the-death affair, and when Rafa took the third’s tiebreak there was an expression of disbelief on Nole’s face that honestly warmed this weekend hacker’s heart. (Let’s call it a draw, dude. If we play for any longer, my wife’s going to kill me. Plus my back’s in bad shape.) My inner Mother Teresa wants to upbraid the USTA for destroying the very players who line its pockets. My inner sadist would’ve liked to watch either Nole or Rafa emerge from bed this morning. I’m picturing the opening scene of North Dallas Forty without the Quaaludes and pot.

Regarding A. and B. above, they go together, of course, but what Djokovic takes advantage of with surgical precision is Nadal’s short ball, the selfsame rally ball that is his bread and butter against mere mortals. Nole pushes Rafa back on the lefty-forehand to righty-backhand exchanges (Djoker’s two-hander being THE best shot in tennis right now) then steps in and goes up the line; and Rafa, who retrieves more of these than any human being should be able to, cannot, in spite of his daunting speed, cover the open territory. Nole next goes up the line hard and flat, all his tentativeness banished during Davis Cup last November. Point. Game. Set. Match. And true, other players (we’re at B. now) have occasionally blown Rafa off the court (Del Potro, Tsonga) but in these cases they were going for broke, playing out of their minds, you pick the cliché. Nole is fast enough, measured enough, accurate enough, to make it routine, some crazy combination of anticipation and world-class speed that confer on him a hummingbird’s perception, the points unfolding, to him at least, comparatively slowly. He’s just always there.

As for the match set by set, it went like this:

1^st Set: The Wind. Rafa: “Why there this wind like this?” Nole, the Egoless One in the Zone of Zones, tunes him.

2^nd Set: The Ridiculous 6^th Game. If Rafa goes up 3–0, he’s still fresh enough that it’s a momentum-swinger, and perhaps he starts letting it fly, but as happened over the course of the whole match, Nole breaks back and Rafa’s ensuing break to 4–4, is basically a Pyrric victory.

3^rd Set:

Into the annals of sports history we go.

4^th Set:

Rafa, spent—it’s hard to believe I’m writing this—simply goes away.

A few other things: There’s been a lot of hyperbole about Nole’s return of serve and, well, sorry folks, the Agassi comparisons aren’t appropriate yet. Go watch, say, the 1995 Australian Open final when Pete was dropping bombs and Andre was sending back unreturnables once a game. Go check out some film of Connors on YouTube. Rafa’s serve was, for most of this match, a point-starter. Gone was last year’s commitment to pop, to hitting the 130s, to pitching. Rafa, in this matchup, isn’t a confident fellow. His serving percentages bore this out, he said as much in the post-match interviews, and he was regularly broken back after breaking, THE momentum killer in singles. Rafa’s confidence gap was also demonstrated in his failure to go up the line on his forehand side and almost never on the backhand. (Roddick’s desperate willingness to do this almost won him Wimby a couple of years back.) In my opinion, only at 5–6 down in the third did Rafa let it fly for an extended period, and it produced scintillating, jaw-dropping exchanges, Thrilla-in-Manilla stuff.

But make no mistake. No matter who you’re rooting for, this is a Golden Age of International Tennis. We have gone from The Reign of Fed to the Battles of Fed/Rafa to the Rise of Nole. Is Peter Jackson directing this movie? I haven’t been this excited since The Empire Strikes Back came out and there was no such thing as iTunes Trailers. What, I’m wondering, is next?

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In Mr. Peanut news, I’ll be appearing with the great Jim Sheppard Sunday, October 16, at The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville; in New York, on October 19, at The Better Book Club—an event that certainly promises to be different. In Ladies and Gentlemen news, here’s an interview I did for The Story Prize blog.

I’m reading multiple books right now, an occasional practice and an approach not suited to my disposition (I’m the single task-oriented type); however, I recommend all of them. First, Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, an analysis/history/meditation on the form, is very stimulating, worth the cover price alone for the chapter, “The Psychology of the Novel,” along with her short critiques of the 100 novels she read in one year. She’s a forceful critic and her assessments of Lolita, Heart of Darkness, and The Great Gatsby, for instance, have made me reconsider their merits as novels qua novels, though I’m struck, at times, by how inured she seems to these writers’ stylistic gifts, the amplitude of their language. Still, the erudition and critical intelligence on display is formidable and I feel like an undergraduate all over again, woefully behind in canonical grasp (Remembrance of Things Past, anyone? The Man Without Qualities? War and Peace).  I’m also halfway through Dominic Sandbrook’s Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of Populist Right. The last nonfiction book I’d read was Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore and so Sandbrook suffers the comparison: the latter’s powers of description are remarkable, his narrative sweeping, his subject mesmerizing. As a catalogue of the times and a description of the zeitgeist, however, Mad is terrific. Finally, there’s Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, my first go with him (I’ve heard great things about his upcoming The Marriage Plot). I like the structure and the nifty way his protagonist/narrator Cal is at once a first– and third-person narrator, interpolating herself during different time sequences, at once omniscient voice and character.

Meanwhile, here’s a terrific interview about Ladies and Gentlemen from The Rumpus as well as a review of the collection in Chattanooga’s Times Free Press.

And another reminder: I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt’s University Club at 6 p.m., August 25, giving a reading/discussion about Mr. Peanut and Ladies and Gentlemen at Hillsboro Village’s Fido, also at 6 p.m., an event done in conjunction with Bookman/Bookwoman bookstore on August 28. Finally, I’ll be appearing with novelists Blake Butler and Jesse Ball (that’s him on the left) at the Decatur Book Festival Labor Day weekend. Read his novel The Curfew. An interesting bit of business.

Meanwhile, an alert regarding several upcoming appearances I’ll be making in the next several weeks. In Nashville, I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt’s University Club at 6 p.m., August 25 (see the hyperlink for details); as well, I’ll be giving a reading/discussion about Mr. Peanut and Ladies and Gentlemen at Hillsboro Village’s Fido, also at 6 p.m., an event done in conjunction with Bookman/Bookwoman bookstore. Finally, I’ll be appearing with novelists Blake Butler and Jesse Ball at the Decatur Book Festival Labor Day weekend.

By the way, if you’re fluent in French, here’s a cool interview I did for the online publication Evene. Mr. Peanut will publish in France this September.

Go Rafa.