Passing Off

Passing #1

by Tom LeClair

Michael Keever, former Celtic teammate of Larry Bird, changes his name and passes himself off as Greek American to play in the Greek Basketball Association, but Michael finds his career, marriage, and daughter are threatened by his secret-keeping when someone suspects his story is false

174 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1996

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

So. amazon workers are/have been on strike in a handful of european countries. [not here. welcome to america where workers are too intimidated to even utter "union"]. I'm ill informed. But dates I've seen range from 10-16 and 16-18. Overlapping on yesterdays 'prime' day sales event thingie. So I didn't buy nothing from amazon yesterday. I stepped out of goodreads for a few hours in hopes of bringing bezos to his knees. I wonder where those libertarian=tards are that'll lecture you about how it's reallyreally important that bezos has his billions so that thousands of workers might even have a job at all with even any money at all to take home. Because we wouldn't at all want to think about democratizing our systems of production and distribution.

At any rate. I'm not buying at amazon so long as that is what amazon workers are asking me to do. But without worker involvement at the job=site level, I'm still not liberal enough to buy the dream that we can consume our way into a better environment nor into better working conditions. It's politics baby. More politics is the answer. [I mean otherwise I'd honestly return to my amish roots]

Back to LeClair. Here's the first of his Passing Trilogy. To which a fourth volume is being appended and will appear shortly. This one here is a novel written by this Keever guy about playing basketball in Greece. And there's a nice bit of eco=terrorism thrown in to make it a real thriller. There's a metaphictional spoiler I won't spoil for you ; you'll get it in the second trilogy volume, Passing On. Which I also recommend you go ahead and read. But not to worry. All four parts of the Trilogy stand on their own and fit sweetly together like atemporal puzzle pieces. In fact, they perhaps glow more strongly for having read them out of pub=order like I did having read Passing Away first which is probably appropriate, taking a backward look at Keever's life from that endish of life perspective.

At any rate, if you go for sports novels written by someone who's not a hack [ie, if you dig Endzone and that baseball one that Coover wrote and (by rumor, whatever) that Rabbit book by that guy] get yourself into some Passing.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite its slim spine, this book brings the enormity you might expect from the man behind the concept of the Systems Novel--in its 175 pages there's ideas about language (English and its Grecian etymologies), ancient world as home, destruction of the ancient world in the modern world, pollution and ecology, the real threat of global warming, what it means to be a developed nation, deep, deep knowledge of basketball and how the game is played, written in effective, quick language that moves fast like the game, multi-valent and layered "deceptions" or "passings off" to trick the reader, the characters, the players. Basically, it's a book brimming with stuff.

If you you're attracted to Greece and Athens, LeClair paints the life of the Greeks in a unique, non-Romanticized way that the West rarely sees, giving great insight into the culture and its tics. The book has prescience, too, into not only the Greek economic woes we've seen in the past decade, but the true threats of global warming, especially to a place like Greece so reliant on its booming tourism business--what happens when the beaches are gone?

In 2007, I took a solo trip to Athens while I lived in London. I actually got a lot of recommendations from LeClair about how to effectively spend my time there. Like most tourists, I was attracted to and enchanted by the promise of the ancient world, but when I arrived I was met by a polluted, confused and post-modern mangle that was exciting and abuzz in a very different way. My expectations were flouted, but I learned many important lessons those days alone in Greece. The book took me back to those days walking the smoggy streets, thick with men flicking worry beads and stray dogs. Alone, atop the Acropolis, I asked an older French woman and her husband if she would take my picture in front of the Parthenon. She smiled and obliged at my clumsy gesturing. A strange moment of unmitigated trust in a foreign land with a foreign stranger and no shared language. When I had the film developed, I came to find she had framed the shot so that my whole body was in the shot with only just suggestions of the Parthenon in the background. At first I was saddened that I didn't have a real iconic shot of me in front of one of the most iconic wonders of this wonderful world--even if the structure was enrobed in scaffolding and hideous at the time--but then, I took closer consideration and realized how well composed and beautiful the photograph was, how it's the only one from my time in Greece without other people in it. Just me and the Parthenon. It captured so much of the country's juxtapositions: modern and ancient--an ancient city on a hill with gridlocked traffic toxifying the air, melting away history above it, loneliness in a crowd, familiarity in a strange land and strangeness in a familiar setting. In other pictures from the top of the Acropolis, the brown haze of pollution stinks out along the horizon. But I couldn't help but love it.

I'm being tangential here to talk about Greece as a special place, because this book does that too. It is. Anyway, if you like literary games of deception and language, of ecology and terrorism, of art and sport, then Passing Off is not to be missed.

[Nancy Brady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basketball player Michael Keever passes himself as an Greek in the novel, and gets caught by authorities, who blackmail him. Can he pull off the basketball, the con, and still manage to return home? This is the first of three books about Michael Keever.