PING

A ping-pong champion is honored while her granddaughter struggles in Lucas and Landsberg’s novel.

Miriam Stahl is about to be inducted into the Table Tennis Hall of Fame, but she’s anxious about some of the media attention she’s getting. Her troubled teenage granddaughter, Jenny, seems to harbor some anger toward the older woman; the crux of Jenny’s issue is that when she became captain of her school’s Ping-Pong team, she was relentlessly bullied, and now she hates everything to do with the sport. Jenny refuses to attend Miriam’s induction ceremony, and her mother, Ronnie, is at her wits’ end. Miriam and her sister, Hildi, head to Toronto for a ping-pong summit. Then readers get a flashback to the 1950s that details some of the ways in which ping-pong was used for politics and diplomacy. Miriam and Hildi become champions in the U.S. around the same time—there’s some anxiety about that, because Miriam and Hildi are Jewish (“They’re Jews and the government is scared of the optics”). The Stahl sisters deal with various forms of antisemitism on their rise to the top. The narrative hops around between communist China under Mao, Nixon’s diplomatic missions to China, the success of the sisters in the 1960s and ’70s, and the present day, as Jenny’s family pressures her to attend her grandmother’s ceremony. There are the roots of a good sports story here, in which the sisters triumph over the dominant Chinese ping-pong players to become champions, but it’s bogged down by background information. (The fictionalized portrayal of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong exploiting the sport for his own ends interrupts the flow of the present-day story.) The authors seem to want to provide a history of ping-pong, but there’s only so much room in this brief novel, and, as a result, the story of Jenny and Miriam almost feels ancillary—none of the characters seem fully fleshed out. There’s some effective dialogue and some engaging ideas here, but the story doesn’t completely come together.

A sports yarn overburdened with history.