Staff Recommendation - The Tennis Partner

The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss
by Abraham Verghese [610.92 Ver]

The Tennis Partner is a story of medicine and tennis, a curious duo played out by Abraham Verghese, a physician and recreational tennis player. As the book opens, he has just moved to El Paso, Texas, to practice and teach at Texas Tech School of Medicine. Moving from the lushness of Tennessee to the arid spaces of the southwest desert signifies a change he welcomes. His marriage to Rajani is disintegrating. Their outsider status, which had previously bound them together during the storms of early adutt life, cannot provide a single touchstone or connection in El Paso, a border city full of outsiders. While supervising the medical interns at the hospital, he meets David Smith, an Aussie who was once on the professional tennis circuit. They strike up a friendship built around their regular tennis matches. An odd couple they make, Smith playing at a part of his life which no longer consumes him and Verghese awakening to his former passion for the game. Verghese re-reads his many boyhood notebooks filled with the intricate details of wrist position and racket angle and his thoughts on the great tennis players of his youth. Verghese sees this attention to details and appreciation of the pure art of tennis much the same as he sees the art of healing for the physician/clinician. Verghese learns that David is a recovering drug addict, facing his last chance to make it through medical school. Failures, excuses and apologies are all too familiar to David as he struggles to maintain his equilibrium in the high-pressure environment of medical internship. But the friends and the support of colleagues cannot keep him clean. Just as he learns he has secured a favored residency position, he succumbs to the familiar demon. David's suicide leaves Verghese with enough haunting questions to fill a new set of notebooks. Why couldn't David be saved? For that matter, why couldn't his own marriage be saved?

[ official Reading Group Guide for this book ] | [ Wikipedia page for Abraham Verghese ]

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