"There are Two Thanksgivings in El Paso..."
Today, I finished reading The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese. His My Own Country: A Doctor's Story is one of the most important AIDS narratives around; I'll be teaching it next fall in my honors seminar. I've had Tennis for awhile. It was on my exam lists for Autobiographies and Memoirs of Illness and Disability, and I did a quick reading in light of the theories and themes I was developing for the exam, but I hadn't done a deep reading. It's worth reading, for sure. Verghese chronicles his relationship with one of his medical students, David Smith, in El Paso. The student is a former tennis player on the pro tour and a recovering cocaine addict. It is an intense discussion of their relationship over a couple of years, of Verghese as teacher of medicine and Smith as teacher of tennis. I won't reveal too much about the plot, but obviously there's depth and intensity if he wrote a memoir of over three hundred pages about it.

In my last year of my second MA, I took Postcolonial Autobiography, and in my final essay, I used theories of the border to analyze Country, and I could really continue that with this text. Yes, it takes place in a border town, but it also explores the borders of teacher and student. I also think there is a lot going on in this text about the kinds of relationships heterosexual men have with each other. I'm not sure what the book is saying about that, yet, but it's a major theme. I could really see an article about that, and I'm adding it to my list of possibilities. After teaching a unit on men and masculinity in my gender course this semester and reading some theories of masculinity for the first time (as opposed to the narratives I normally read and teach), I see a lot of possibilities.

One of my mentors once told me that she was bothered by the text's portrayal of women, and I really see her point. He separates from his wife early in the text, and whenever he mentions women, they are clearly objectified. What I mean is that, when he talks about men, they sound like his equals, but when he talks about women, they are very distanced from him and almost unreal. Some are on pedestals, and some are in the gutters. The virgin/whore dichotomy is so strong. True, that might be enough to turn off readers, but since the book is primarily about his relationship to David, women don't pop up much, and when they do, it's a bit funny. I would get drawn into the narrative about David, and then they would mention a female patient or employee, and I would be pulled out and giggle a bit, honestly. But that adds to the ideas about masculinity I mentioned earlier.

And, no, I do not mean to say that heterosexual men are sexist. But there are tensions about masculinity in this text that I think relate to representations of women. There's a lot of substance in this text deserving attention.
- posted by Nels @ 9:00 PM | | | Link |