The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Passing Off by Tom LeClair
Brooke Horvath

Tom LeClair. Passing Off. Permanent Press, 1996. 174 pp. $22.00.

The author of In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel and The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, Tom LeClair is also a former point guard who now spends part of each year playing basketball in Greece. Passing Off, his first novel, draws upon such experiences to do for roundball what Don DeLillo, in End Zone, did for football: to take us deep into the sport itself while also reading it as a synecdoche of the cultural complexity—here, American and Greek—of which it is a part, as one system among many where the means to and definition of all sorts of mastery are contested and in which web of interconnecting systems the individual is always already implicated.

Plotwise by sodium-vaporlight, Passing Off concerns former CBA All-Star Michael Keever. A playmaker—hence the center of on-court knowledge and control—Keever’s best was never good enough to land him a permanent spot in the NBA, but, jumped to Greece, he stars as the “funnel point” for Panathinaikos in the Greek Basketball Association. All that was necessary was to relocate to Athens, get used to some cultural differences, and feign Greek ancestry, which Keever, metamorphosed into Mikhalis Kyvernos, manages successfully until his hoax is uncovered and he is blackmailed into an off-court assist—helping stage an act of ecoterrorism to dramatize the ecological nightmare awaiting us all and foreshadowed during Keever’s year in Athens by water shortages and a “thermal inversion” whose stagnant, heavily polluted air leaves dozens dead.

While the novel knowledgeably re-creates a season of Greek ball and entertainingly sketches daily life in Greece—its tavernas and storied ruins, traffic jams and vagetable toting fans—LeClair exposes basketball’s defining characteristics as illustrative of how, today, one must necessarily be in this world, both “injecting information deep into [one’s] body” and “recovering knowledge from that source, recognizing how the crowded and collaborating inside overlaps with . . . the crowded, collaborating, competing outside world.”

If LeClair owes a debt to DeLillo—in his fascination with crowds, technologically mediated experience, word-driven worlds, banal surfaces betrayed by their engimatic, sinister undersides—he has made such material his own, deftly peeling back the overlapping overlays—tourism and terrorism, ecology and history, economics and politics, language and aesthetics—that “anywhere, nowhere, or everywhere” infiltrate and affect us. Moreover, no one writes better about basketball as seen through the eyes of a player in action (“all filmy memory, fuzzy logic, informed estimation, exact guesswork”) or understands more suasively both the limits of words even in a world where language seems always not only to precede but to determine events, and the need, in such a world, to feel “like an athlete outside, as well as inside, the gym.” [Brooke Horvath]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Passing Off by Tom LeClair Brooke Horvath Tom LeClair. Passing Off. Permanent Press, 1996. 174 pp. $22.00. The author of In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel and The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction, Tom LeClair is also a former point guard who now spends part of each year playing basketball in Greece. Passing Off, his first novel, draws upon such experiences to do for roundball what Don DeLillo, in End Zone, did for football: to take us deep into the sport itself while also reading it as a synecdoche of the cultural complexity—here, American and Greek—of which it is a part, as one system among many where the means to and definition of all sorts of mastery are contested and in which web of interconnecting systems the individual is always already implicated. Plotwise by sodium-vaporlight, Passing Off concerns former CBA All-Star Michael Keever. A playmaker—hence the center of on-court knowledge and control—Keever’s best was never good enough to land him a permanent spot in the NBA, but, jumped to Greece, he stars as the “funnel point” for Panathinaikos in the Greek Basketball Association. All that was necessary was to relocate to Athens, get used to some cultural differences, and feign Greek ancestry, which Keever, metamorphosed into Mikhalis Kyvernos, manages successfully until his hoax is uncovered and he is blackmailed into an off-court assist—helping stage an act of ecoterrorism to dramatize the ecological nightmare awaiting us all and foreshadowed during Keever’s year in Athens by water shortages and a “thermal inversion” whose stagnant, heavily polluted air leaves dozens dead. While the novel knowledgeably re-creates a season of Greek ball and entertainingly sketches daily life in Greece—its tavernas and storied ruins, traffic jams and vagetable toting fans—LeClair exposes basketball’s defining characteristics as illustrative of how, today, one must necessarily be in this world, both “injecting information deep into [one’s] body” and “recovering knowledge from that source, recognizing how the crowded and collaborating inside overlaps with . . . the crowded, collaborating, competing outside world.” If LeClair owes a debt to DeLillo—in his fascination with crowds, technologically mediated experience, word-driven worlds, banal surfaces betrayed by their engimatic, sinister undersides—he has made such material his own, deftly peeling back the overlapping overlays—tourism and terrorism, ecology and history, economics and politics, language and aesthetics—that “anywhere, nowhere, or everywhere” infiltrate and affect us. Moreover, no one writes better about basketball as seen through the eyes of a player in action (“all filmy memory, fuzzy logic, informed estimation, exact guesswork”) or understands more suasively both the limits of words even in a world where language seems always not only to precede but to determine events, and the need, in such a world, to feel “like an athlete outside, as well as inside, the gym.” [Brooke Horvath]

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