a weekend in new york (benjamin markovits)

Almost a decade ago I read You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Markovits, which I remember as a wistfully astute dissection of Obama era USA. Ten years on any US idealism that might have existed has been subsumed by the geriatric administrations of Biden and Trump. A Weekend in New York sees the writer focusing on a family weekend in up market New York, as a B-List tennis player competes at the US Open and his intellectual powerhouse family come to watch. The book, as the title would suggest, is set over a single weekend, before the tennis player’s opening match on the Monday. Markovits takes us in painstaking detail through the hours, switching his attention from one family member to the next. The family bickers and their vulnerabilities are put on show. Markovits isn’t interested in conclusions, there is no real narrative (we never learn the result of the tennis match), rather his is a snapshot of a world, perhaps Knausgaard-esque (not having read the big K) or Woolfian. It’s faintly addictive, perhaps like watching a tennis match, as the reader’s head turns from side to side, but these are not easy characters to engage with, with their lightly-taken sense of privilege, their views of Central Park and expensive brunches. These people are on the fringes of the rulers of the western world, nabobs in an imperial system, but the writer seems to shy away from casting any kind of judgement, as if he were another family member, unwilling to rock the boat. The most intriguing strand in the book is the one around the elder bother, Nathan, who is investigating the legal framework for the state’s right to unilaterally assassinate via drone strike. It feels as though, in this era of para-legal playstation killing, Markovits is touching a nerve that is both fascinating and urgent, but he pulls his punches, and the novel leaves us little the wiser with regard to the issue or the state of the nation under discusion. 

Ps - publishing this at the time of the US Open happening, it does feel as though Markovits might have delved more into the world of tennis, the hook upon which the novel is hung. The excesses of the tennis circuit, the unbridled arrogance of globalisation, the egos… it all feels as though it would be ripe for the author’s analytical intelligence.