Title: Disappointing book from a good writer
Product review: The author of My Own Country seems to have lost his touch. Nowhere in The Tennis Partner do you see the same charm or honesty. His prose continues to be elegant, and his images vivid. But this story is simply not as compelling as the one he had to tell in My Own Country. The fatal flaw in The Tennis Partner is that you never really understand the basis of the friendship between the doctor and David. What, besides tennis, did they have in common? David is Verghese's intellectual inferior and the doctor's fascination for him is puzzling. Another problem is the structure of the book. He juxtaposes long italicized segments on tennis that have nothing to do with anything, with themes of drug addiction, medicine, loneliness, marital breakdown, David's relationships with women, and travel-book descriptions of El Paso. The book simply does not cohere. I hope Dr. Verghese can give us more in his next book.
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