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59 pages 1 hour read

Abraham Verghese

The Tennis Partner

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1998

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Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue Summary

Content Warning: This section contains mentions and descriptions of substance use, addiction, and suicide.

An unnamed intern receives a page in the middle of his rounds, and he panics when he sees the number. After some indecision, he heads to Dr. Lou Binder’s office. When Dr. Binder says they must head to the lab, the intern breaks down crying. He is put on a flight from El Paso to Atlanta, where he goes to the Talbott-Marshall Clinic to meet Dr. Doug Talbott. Dr. Talbott was once a world-famous cardiologist but suffered from alcohol and drug addiction. After multiple rounds of rehab, he founded a center focused on treatment for doctors with addiction.

Dr. Talbott tells the intern he has a disease that needs lifelong treatment and reassures him that while he may feel guilt, he need not feel shame. The intern attends a meeting with the rest of the members of the clinic, all doctors dealing with addiction. They discuss how their work is the last thing to suffer; relationships, finances, and health are all affected first. Later that night, in the apartment he has been assigned, the intern recoils from his reflection in the mirror, feeling betrayed by his own image. However, he knows that if he wants to practice medicine again, he needs to confront the person in the mirror.

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

Abraham Verghese, an “African-born-but-of-Indian-parentage-naturalized-American” (15), arrives in El Paso, Texas, with his family. After three days of unpacking, he drives to his first day of work. He enjoys being a newcomer in town with the opportunity to start with a clean slate.

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

Abraham is a member of the medical faculty at Texas Tech as well as an internal medicine consultant at the neighboring Thomason Hospital. He meets his first patient, Enrique, a young man who came in because of a lesion on his nose. It turned out to be Kaposi sarcoma, a cancer that develops in people with AIDS. After evading treatment for six months, he has come in again because of an increasing shortness of breath. Enrique explains his mother does not know he has AIDS or that he is gay. He refuses to tell his mother the truth, insisting she will not be able to handle it. Abraham tells Enrique’s mother that her son is being treated for pneumonia, and she does not ask any further questions.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Abraham grew up in Ethiopia, where his Indian parents worked as teachers. Their constant fighting leads him to seek solace outdoors, and Abraham spends hours either cycling or hitting a tennis ball against the side of a shed. He imagines he is playing tennis greats like Rod Laver and Pancho Segura. Twice a week, Abraham attends a group tennis lesson. He picks up the game quickly and displays potential, recording insights from the lessons in a notebook. However, his parents do not nurture his talent, seeing the game as a hobby.

Years later, during his internship in America, Abraham rediscovers the game and begins playing obsessively again. In the process, the “restless and secretive boy” he used to be reemerges (28), and his wife, Rajani, points out that he is spending way too much time on the courts.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

A few weeks after Abraham moves to El Paso, an Indian restaurant opens up in town. An elderly Sikh man runs the register, and his son works as the maître d’. Abraham and his family eat at the restaurant occasionally, and he strikes up easy conversations with the staff due to their shared cultural roots. A few weeks after the restaurant opens, two men break in, shoot the elderly cashier, and rob the place. Abraham is working in the hospital when the man is brought into the ER; the trauma team is unable to save him. The man’s family leaves town after his death. His murder is never solved, but the restaurant carries on.

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Abraham learns from a colleague that one of the medical students assigned to his ward for the next month, an Australian named David Smith, plays tennis. He runs into David in the parking lot the same day and is surprised to see that David is almost as old as he is. David appears nervous when Abraham explains he heard about David’s history on the tennis pro tour. Abraham invites him to play sometime, almost instantly regretting it. He worries that he will not be able to keep up with him. However, David accepts almost immediately.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Abraham reflects on how a white tennis ball was used at Wimbledon until 1986. It was difficult to spot on television, sometimes disappearing entirely from view. If one knew anything about the game, one could visualize its exact trajectory based on the player’s shots and positions. If one’s guesses were accurate, the ball would eventually re-materialize on screen exactly where one expected it to.

Abraham parallels tracking the white ball with the “art of diagnosis,” in which a doctor tracks an invisible disease, predicts where it will strike next, and cuts it off before it can do more damage.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

Abraham is unable to sleep the night before he is due to play with David. He goes to the bedroom where his sons, Steven and Jacob, are sleeping, straightening their sheets before returning to the spare bedroom. Rajani is asleep in the master bedroom. Abraham reflects on how they came to sleep in separate beds. Their differences in temperament drove them apart until Rajani took the boys to India for a while, during which time Abraham had an affair. After he confessed, Abraham and Rajani decided to divorce, but they both moved to El Paso to raise their children together. The plan is to buy a house for Rajani and the boys in El Paso and settle them in before Abraham moves out. The boys were told the plan shortly after they moved in.

Unable to sleep, Abraham looks through his things and finds his old tennis notebooks, filled with clippings and notes about his favorite players and their shots, playing styles, and games. Abraham turns to a page where he has jotted down insights about his own forehand shot and serve. Rajani, coming to investigate the noise, sees Abraham with the notebooks. He quickly puts them away, wondering where they would be now if he had perhaps paid the same amount of attention to his marriage as he did to his tennis game.

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary

Abraham meets David at the El Paso Tennis Club. David briefly introduces Abraham to Ross Walker, the head pro at the club, before they get changed and begin to play. David and Abraham begin with warm-up shots, and Abraham admires the grace of David’s game while feeling slightly nervous and apologetic about his own.

Afterward, David says he enjoyed playing with Abraham. He initially wanted to say no because he did not want to play against anyone. Back when he played pro, the competition got so toxic that it took the joy out of the game for him. The two exchange phone numbers before heading home.

When Abraham runs into David at the hospital the next day, the latter suggests they play regularly, a couple of times a week. Abraham is thrilled—he had been looking for a way to formulate the same request. They decide on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 8 Analysis

The Tennis Partner opens with a Prologue that establishes the book’s setting, context, and main ideas. An unnamed medical intern flies out of El Paso, Texas, to a rehab center in Atlanta specializing in addiction treatment for physicians. While the intern’s identity remains a mystery, the Prologue establishes where the story takes place: in a hospital setting in El Paso. The Prologue also foreshadows The Disease of Addiction, an important central theme in the book. Dr. Talbott’s conversation with the intern introduces the idea that substance addiction is a disease and one that particularly plagues those in the medical industry. The Prologue is the only part of the book penned in the third person; the rest of the book is narrated by Abraham Verghese, who is both author and narrator. Abraham is a doctor himself, an internal medicine specialist who has just arrived in El Paso.

In his opening chapters, Abraham looks forward to a fresh start in El Paso. Abraham and his wife, Rajani, have decided to divorce, and he is planning to move out to a place of his own. The tension in Abraham’s life at the opening of his memoir underlines a second central theme in the book: Navigating Loneliness and Conflict in Relationships. Abraham is no stranger to marital conflict; recollections of his childhood in Ethiopia indicate that his parents, too, had a difficult marriage. The tension at home causes him to retract into himself, and he chooses to distract himself by cycling or playing tennis. As an adult, Abraham continues to respond to conflict with avoidance, withdrawing from his wife and family and taking refuge in first a mistress and then the game of tennis to avoid confronting the problems in his relationships. Abraham recognizes that this pattern of behavior contributes to his loneliness: As he recalls the dedication he gave to analyzing his tennis swing as a child, he realizes that he failed to bring that level of dedication to his marriage. Yet he continues to follow the same patterns. This episode foreshadows the struggles both Abraham and David will face with conflict and loneliness, as well as some aspects of The Disease of Addiction.

Tennis is a grounding force for both child and adult Abraham, in large part because it gives him access to The Power of Ritual. As a child, he looks forward to his twice-weekly lessons eagerly. They provide him with structure, giving him something to depend on during a difficult time in his life. In El Paso, his and David’s decision to play tennis together regularly offers Abraham a much-needed sense of social connection. The tennis game itself also carries out multiple functions in the book. At different times, it is used as a metaphor, a recurring motif underlining The Power of Ritual, and as a narrative technique. After David accepts Abraham’s invitation to play tennis, an entire chapter is dedicated to how a white tennis ball was once used at Wimbledon. Other seemingly disjointed recollections or incidents to do with tennis are interspersed throughout the book. In each instance, they signify a larger idea, event, or important aspect of the story. The chapter about the white tennis ball showcases that Abraham is equally knowledgeable and passionate about tennis and medicine. Both his passions shape the way he understands himself and the world.

In addition to tennis, two other important symbols and motifs introduced in the opening chapters are Abraham’s notebooks and the unnamed intern recoiling from his reflection. Both Abraham and David keep journals, and for both, what they write reveals important aspects of their personalities. Abraham’s tennis journals show that he is meticulous and analytical, though his reflection on the fact that he keeps journals about tennis but not about his personal thoughts and feelings suggests that he might use his journals to avoid self-reflection as much as to engage in it. Similarly, the intern in the Prologue recoils from his own reflection in the mirror but realizes that to fix his problems, he will have to learn to confront them. Journaling and reflections in the mirror are connected by the common motif of self-reflection and the challenge it poses to many.

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