Anthropomorphically speaking, ping-pong players get shafted. The tiny rubber bumps covering their paddles are known, rather unfortunately, as “pimples.”
Pimples!
Even weekend duffers get to describe the indentations on golf balls as “dimples.” How likable. Who isn’t charmed by dimples?
Not so with the ping-pong set. They’re condemned to the vocabulary of teenage insecurity, dermal irritation and Clearasil ads. Not exactly a formula for impressing chicks.
Yet Howard Jacobson, the wickedly funny British novelist, and his literary embodiment, Oliver Walzer, both deluded themselves, for a time at least, into thinking that competitive ping-pong would bring them fame, riches and the affections of beautiful women. They more often found spectator-free gymnasiums and hormonally exacerbated frustration.
The empty — or near-empty — room is generally what Jacobson encountered the last time he toured America, back when he was promoting his critically acclaimed 2006 novel, “Kalooki Nights.” The highlight, he says one afternoon as we enter Comet Ping Pong, Northwest Washington’s cathedral to all things ping-pongy, was an odd encounter with a 90-year-old woman at one of his readings in California. She placed something around his neck. A laurel? A medal? A lei? None of the above.
Inexplicably, it was her hearing aids, attached to long cords. He never really figured out what she was trying to express.
“That,” Jacobson says, “was the highlight. The highlight! Abysmal.”
This time, though, things are different. Jacobson’s suddenly a literary star with transcontinental appeal, and he’s playing to generous crowds at readings in the United States, a country that once essentially ignored him. Winning the prestigious Man Booker Prize in October transformed him into a headliner after three decades marked by less-than-blockbuster sales, frequent critical acclaim and no small measure of critical disdain — one reviewer called him the most “phallocentric” English-language author. Jacobson was honored for his novel, “The Finkler Question,” a satire that pivots on the lives of a gentile who longs to be a Jew and a Jew who joins a group called the “ASHamed Jews.”
The award was a surprise because comic novels — even darkly comic ones — seldom win. In years past, two of Jacobson’s novels had been long-listed twice for the award but fallen short. “There is a particular pleasure in seeing somebody who is this good finally getting his just deserts,” Sir Andrew Motion, chairman of the judges, said of the choice.
Jacobson revealed the most about himself in “The Mighty Walzer,” a 1999 semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel recently released in the United States, as his publishers attempt to piggyback on his newfound celebrity.
A half-century has passed since Jacobson was a top-10-ranked teenage ping-ponger growing up in 1950s northern England. He is still a purist at the table. In the backroom at Comet Ping Pong, he considers, then quickly rejects, a modern sponge paddle, a smooth-faced design that gives players more control over shots but mutes the satisfying plock-plock produced by harder old-school paddles . . . the ones with visible, rather than concealed, pimples.
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