Underspin by E. Y. Zhao

Underspin

By E. Y. Zhao

Astra, 2025

Many years ago, George Plimpton, amateur athlete and professional writer about sports, said “the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature.”  For him, golf was the smallest ball, and he listed many men who had written well about it.  But I think he’s wrong: smaller than a golf ball, if weight is considered, is the insubstantial ping pong ball.  And yet until now, I know of only one novel—Howard Jacobson’s The Mighty Walzer, published in 2011—about ping pong or “table tennis,” if you’re serious about the sport as E. Y. Zhao is in her first novel Underspin.

Ms. Zhao knows of what she speaks.  Now apparently in her late twenties, she played for her college teams at Harvard and at Michigan, where she earned an MFA.  I know some of what she knows and writes about in Underspin.  One chapter is about an aging actress named Susanne and her partner, a younger pong enthusiast named Jonah, who open a ping pong and social club in Manhattan, a brand that “proliferated” across the country.  They are stand-ins for Susan Sarandon and her boyfriend of the period Jonathan Bricklin who, along with others, founded SPiN, a club now franchised.  I know because I worked at SPiN from its beginning and for seven years.  I suppose I mention that experience to establish my table tennis bona fides as much as Zhao’s.

An octogenarian, I still play ping pong, sometimes against teens, but I admit to having little interest in most coming of age novels.  Underspin is different. The protagonist, San Francisco native Ryan Lo, suffers from symbolic progeria: he begins aging at eight when first coached and continues at smashing speed, rapidly passing through stages of early triumph, attempts at maturity, self-sabotage, failure, and death.  This is not a spoiler because Zhao’s “Prologue” is about Ryan’s funeral.  All athletes “die” young, lose their prowess, age out.  Ryan Lo goes out and under before 25.

Another attractive difference of Underspin: it’s no pathetic imitation “autobiography.”  Ryan’s aging is told in fifteen chapters with thirteen different points of view, a few of them first-person, most limited third-person.  Ryan does not have a chapter to himself.  Zhao imagines him as a mysterious prodigy who reveals very little of himself in conversations and in his actions away from the table.  Zhao’s other characters try to fill in the blanks, but, more importantly, their multiple perspectives document the high-pressure world that created Ryan and contributed to the plot of his short life.

Tournament and professional table tennis in the United States is a very small world compared to the universes of major sports.  The best big-ball sports novels such as John Updike’s Rabbit Run, Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, and Don DeLillo’s End Zone bulge out into the larger world.  Zhao begins her move outward by showing that high-achieving table tennis players are, basically, meat machines engineered by coaches and financed by parents.  The players are not obvious naturals, not like overgrown kids who become basketball players or football players.  Ordinary children are transformed into impressive small-ball and small-world athletes through years of exacting, repetitive, and often punishing training that Zhao repeatedly describes to communicate the obsessiveness at the heart of elite table tennis. 

Many of the players in the novel and in the world it represents are from Asian-American families.  Zhao includes some tiger parents, but I think her reach outward is longer and more interesting than ethnic critique.  Underspin suggests it’s not just Asian kids who are prodded to excel and compete and mature early and, for many, fail soon.  For many middle and upper class American parents now, childhood and childish play are an unaffordable luxury.  In a hyper-competitive information economy, game replaces play: as early as possible get the best educational training, learn the strokes of success, hit them obsessively, claw past your “friends” on social media, come out on top.  Get into Harvard.  And if you can’t succeed that way, then learn how to game the system as one of Zhao’s major characters does.

The body can be trained and drilled but, ultimately, not gamed, not deceived about its inherent limits.  This, of course, is the existential aspect of most sports fiction that shows youth replacing age, rookie displacing vet.  In Underspin, the process of wear, tear, and breakdown is speeded up by the unavoidable training.  Even as a child, Ryan had one problematic leg that could interfere with his aggression and undermine his career.  In table tennis, the killer shots are topspins.  They are the hits that get one to the top of the heap.  Underspins are defensive, in a way admission of failure, of the body’s inability to generate aggressive winners.  Underspin shows the underside of its sport, not just its culture but its physical consequences for young bodies.  A character meditating on a Ryan injury says, “This is not one of those hackneyed narratives terminating at the broken body,” but he’s half wrong about Zhao’s narrative: it’s not hackneyed but does terminate with Ryan’s broken body in an accident that some intimates believe was suicide.

Because table tennis is not a subject likely to attract many readers, I have frontloaded what I think is Zhao’s achievement in Underspin.  Now the details, the people and pleasures and, I think, an unfortunate flaw in Zhao’s deuce game, her final chapters.  A free-spirited Ryan is first seen as a child by another child coached by Kristian Kaellenius, a German émigré.  As a teen and later, Ryan’s whimsicalities and behavioral tics are reported by another, now former, member of Kristian’s club.  Ryan has an off and on girlfriend named Anabel, a national champion like Ryan.  She seems to be a representative of maturity, but even she cannot escape table tennis culture.  She may even float a destructive lie to possess the club that raised her. 

At 21, Ryan leaves the United States to break from his coach and make money playing for a German professional team, but now dependent on medications for pain and anxiety he is unreliable and soon released.  It’s in the chapter set in Germany, about halfway through the novel, that Zhao begins to let her novel slip into current predictability just as Ryan slides into self-sabotage.  She introduces a sports psychologist who was a teammate of Kaellenius decades earlier when he was fired after rumors about abusing one of his charges.  Kaellenius moved to the West Coast, where he opened his club and became a towering figure in American table tennis. 

When Ryan returns to the United States in 2016, he is hired by Susanne and Jonah; has sex with her; is fired by Jonah; and gets a come-down assistant coaching job in a small-time Indiana club run by an older man that Ryan used to beat and by his son, whom Ryan continues to beat though drugs and alcohol are diminishing his skills.  As Ryan often does, he betrays those who befriend him and soon moves back to the Bay Area where he is flailing and falling.  But it’s the fall of Kaellenius that, I think unwisely, dominates the last third of the novel, “Deuce,” where Zhao shifts focus from the obsessions of a culture to the obsession of an individual, one who may be symbolic of the culture but not representative.

Only if one has a very good seat, as I did as the scorekeeper for the weekly tournament at SPiN, is professional table tennis watchable.  And only if one has had some coaching, are subtleties of high-level play appreciated.  Zhao knows these limitations and spends very few paragraphs on play by play, just enough to communicate the incredible speed and deceptive spin of professional shot-making.  Her self-imposed challenge is constructing a novel from multiple stories and various points of view and the different styles required by those points of view—her many-eyed literary vision an alternative to the tunnel vision of the sport she presents. 

In form and style, I think, Zhao has remarkable success for a first-time novelist.  The prodigy Ryan had a variety of winning moves.  So does the young Zhao as she assumes the perspective of an aged Chinese couple sent to ping pong from their nursing home, a middle-aged coach now obsessed with the tables (rather than the players) in his club, a failed player who became a tournament umpire, a former Olympian with aching knees who tries her best to avoid becoming a club owner, even the sexually needy Susanne. 

Only in the “Epilogue” does Zhao give herself the novelist the chance to be briefly lyrical, watching through the eyes of museum guards the joy and art of playing table tennis at Ryan Lo level.  One boy “…was so much better than his opponent; but the universe had conspired to grant the lesser player a string of genius, courage, strength, luck that only emphasized the greatness of his superior, and which, after raising its witnesses above the cloud line of ultimate enjoyment (deuce in the fifth) let them see the dreariness of everything below, ordinary life….”

One last personal note: my first novel was about a basketball player.  I was obsessed with that sport and went on to write four more about him.  Zhao knows about obsession, and the techniques of Underspin demonstrate she knows how to break it.  I am quite sure, and thankfully so, that Zhao’s next novel will not be about table tennis or some other ball sport.

Tom LeClair is the author of eight novels, four critical books, and hundreds of essays and reviews.