Letter Eighteen | 12/7 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
There’s nothing to say alongside Zach’s letter; it can only be acknowledged and saluted. As a gesture of respect, then, here’s something totally otherwise.
For the first time in, what, seventeen or eighteen days, there were no Cup games today, and so we’ve arrived at a kind of halfway point. What this means is that I have a structural excuse to return the conversation, at least for a moment, to Sally Rooney (surpriiiiiiise!).
In 2017, between the publication of Conversations with Friends and Normal People, a Rooney story appeared in The New Statesman with a title that makes its appeal for this project pretty clear: “Robbie Brady’s astonishing late goal takes its place in our personal histories.” While this isn’t, uh, a great title—it sounds like it describes a weird art installation, like a huge palimpsestic sculpture of Irish midfielder Robbie Brady constructed entirely of the artist’s teenage diary pages, or something—it does make the quote I used to begin the project another valence, another node of significance. I’ve stashed a copy of the story here.
Clearly, the story represents Rooney working through some of the thematic slosh that Normal People eventually took up. Conor and Helen (that is, Connell and Marianne, although Rooney reuses Helen’s name in the novel, and neither character in this version is quite as sharply characterized as their novelistic counterparts) do what Rooney characters do: they have a conversation, mostly about themselves and the way they feel and the way they feel about the way they feel, that seems somehow intimate and reticent at once. And Brady’s goal, scored at the 2016 Euros against Italy to send the Irish into the knockouts, isn’t actually mentioned much after the first couple of paragraphs.
But as the title makes clear, there’s something about Brady’s goal that lingers cloudlike over the story. At the very least the goal inaugurates the narrative, makes it possible for the story to unfold, and in this way becomes its ground or teleological origin, at once necessary for the story and not quite assimilable in the story’s own terms. Brady’s goal is an emotional, affective excitation; it’s a social catalyst; it’s a singularity of attention that, by pulling Conor and Helen both into its orbit, places them in relation to each other.
There hasn’t been an excellent American soccer novel. The English, by which I mean just David Peace, has produced a couple: The Damned United, which is a find psychological portrait, and Red or Dead, which is a seriously bold formal experiment in the everydayness of soccer, the compression of time, and the application of a Biblical register to the experience of sports. It’s also, for anybody but people very much like you and I, absolutely unreadable. There’s Peter Handke, a Nobel laureate and possessor of very bad politics, who wrote The goalkeeper’s anxiety at the penalty kick, which isn’t really about soccer at all. Ross Raisin’s A Natural came out a couple of years ago and was fine. There’s more nonfiction: the whole subgenre of “global politics but soccer,” and the sub-subgenre of “books that soccer fans own,” like Inverting the Pyramid and Soccernomics. Nick Hornby, of course, whose Fever Pitch is legitimately quite good.
Baseball rules the novel, and one reason, I think, is that baseball is slow, iterative, paratactical, and segmented—which is to say it lends itself well to the novel form. It resembles the patterns of everyday life the novel is supposedly rooted in. There’s room for rumination in the speed of play. Progress proceeds by actions—pitches, innings—and so are easily narratable. Not to mention, of course, how thoroughly baseball is bound up with the American mythos; there’s a reason Don DeLillo used Yankee Stadium as the objective correlative for Americanness in the opening scene to Mao II. Whitman talks about baseball; I’m not sure if Twain does.
Baseball is also self-mythologizing, which means it carries an immanent narrativity, a charge and a set of stakes, the novel can build upon. Soccer, especially in an American context, does not, which means it will have to perform a different kind of narrative role when the soccer novel finally finds its feet, so to speak. Maybe whatever novel arrives will look sort of like Rooney’s work—that is, soccer will be an object of shared attention, a cultural hotspot. If so, I think it’ll look more specifically like Normal People, Rooney’s least interior novel, because (and here's the big claim) soccer is an externalized sport, whereas baseball is an internalized one.
I only half-believe this, right now, but there’s potential here. Soccer has geniuses, baseball has philosophers (again, at least in the popular imaginary). But, contrariwise, soccer has politics, whereas baseball has performances. The sharpest soccer players (and managers) are political agents—Socrates, Shankly, Rashford—and this is just among the men; the women and enbys don’t often have the choice to be political because their very presence means political hypersignification. Soccer is about sociality, organization, concerted choreography (that is, politics!), whereas baseball is about psychologization, individualized matchups—it’s epic, in the narratological sense, in that way.
What this means, I guess, is that a soccer novel will have to adopt a form that reflects this externalization, this political sensibility. Maybe something like Red or Dead moves in this direction. Maybe we’ll need the kind of anti-character novel that Rachel Cusk and David Markson and W.G. Sebald and Teju Cole made famous. Maybe, probably, it’ll look like something else entirely.
There was soccer on today: the women’s Champions League! Arsenal beat Juve 1-0 on a cool half-volley from Vivianne Miedema, my absolute hero, who never celebrates her goals. There’s a kind of coolness about her that makes her, would make her, an excellent character. It’s not Ronaldo’s mechanistic coolness, but rather evidence of something lightly held, a supreme self-holding, something not identical but maybe akin to the flippancy of a Kyrgios or a Boris Diaw. Unlike Kyrgios, it’s not that Miedema can’t be bothered; unlike Diaw, Miedema is not just world-class but world-class among the world-class. It’s something else, a basically mysterious arrangement of affective orientations. It’s absolutely fascinating.
Anyway, another off day tomorrow!
All best,
Ryan