Andre Agassi, Open

velvet ropes & radical omissions

“Hit harder, my father yells.”

Writing a book, like renovating a house, is an unending series of decisions. First person or third? Past tense or present? By the time you get down to choosing how to punctuate your dialogue (in renovation terms this is something like choosing your interior doors), the temptation is to wearily lay down your head and say, Can’t someone else choose? Are there really even options for this?

But there are, there are. And they matter. You could, without raising a single eyebrow, go with the sturdy American double-quotation mark, as ninety percent of writers do.

“Lennie!” he said sharply. “Lennie for God’ sakes don’t drink so much!”

These doubly-reinforced quotation marks create a firm and impenetrable barrier between what’s spoken and the surrounding prose. Steinbeck (the author of the passage above) would himself presumably say “God’s sake.” It’s his character George who says “God’ sakes.” No voice particles risk slipping from one side of the door to the other; your guests will never be confused.

But, if you’re feeling a bit more daring (daring, that is, if you’re American), you could go with the tasteful minimalism of the British single-quotation mark, as David Foster Wallace does in Infinite Jest.

‘How about the both of you shut the fuck up,’ says Emil Minty.

The door between the surrounding prose and the dialogue is still impenetrable — but the heavy, rusting ironwork of those double-quotation marks has been replaced with a layer of airy glass. “The both of you” is a good piece of hearing — it belongs to the character of Emil — but it’s also, thanks to that single quotation mark, Wallace’s. The fineness of the punctuational barrier encourages us to remember, and to appreciate, that the author is after all the one doing a voice.

Then, a step artier still, we have the em-dash, used most famously by Joyce in Ulysses.

— Back to barracks, he said sternly.

The door has here come off altogether, and in its place we have something like the velvet ropes they use to cordon off rooms in a historic house. The distinction between narrative and dialogue has become daringly slight. The author’s voice redounds audibly throughout the space.

But there’s one further option, the most radical of all. Nothing.

Hi Papa, he said.

I’m right here.

I know.

The only thing separating the speech from the narration now is our own weightless awareness — we have lost the armature of punctuation altogether. The most famous punctuation-abjurer is Cormac McCarthy (the author of the passage above). The most effective — or anyway the most effective that I’ve come across lately — is Andre Agassi.

For years people had been telling me that Agassi’s memoir Open was “actually” good. With that actually people were nodding toward a truth universally acknowledged: that sports memoirs are, as a rule, dreadful. Colorless recitations of long-irrelevant contests punctuated by high school graduation bromides, pasted together by some poor, hurried ghostwriter, spaced as generously as the publisher’s self-respect will allow. And by these standards Open is indeed a work of genius.

But even by ordinary standards Open is good. Quite good, actually. J.R. Moehringer (who wrote his own affable memoir before becoming the world’s most sought-after ghost-memoirist) contributed mightily to its polish. I read it in a week — a YouTube window featuring years-old matches often open beside me — and was sorry when it was over. And much of its goodness — its surprising force and propulsion — has to do with Agassi’s (or Moehringer’s) decision to let its dialogue go naked.

Look at this early passage, when a seven-year-old Andre is hitting balls in the Las Vegas heat with his overbearing nightmare of a father.

Hit harder, my father yells. Hit harder. Now backhands. Backhands.

My arm feels like it’s going to fall off. I want to ask, How much longer, Pops? But I don’t ask. I do as I’m told. I hit as hard as I can, then slightly harder. On one swing I surprise myself by how hard I hit, how cleanly. Though I hate tennis, I like the feeling of hitting a ball dead perfect. It’s the only peace.

The prose is speedy and serviceable; the psychology is believable and complex (Agassi’s hatred of tennis — and his dependence on the relief it brings him — will be with him his entire life). And by placing his father’s words within the stream of his own voice, Agassi has transformed them from being lines in a bad biopic flashback into something more intimate: words spoken to us across a table, now. This is Agassi’s story, not his father’s, and it is, like tennis, a solo performance.

You know that special tone that people use, in telling a story, when they’re quoting something that someone said to them? They don’t do an impression of the speaker, exactly, but they give their voice a slight lift; they shift something in their shoulders. This is what Agassi does, with his punctuation-less dialogue throughout the book, and it creates a series of pleasing di-chords: we hear Agassi’s voice and his father’s; Agassi’s voice and Brooke Shields’s.

And so the words of others — since they are played, from the first, on the instrument of Agassi’s own voice — slip naturally from the realm of hearing into the realm of thought. Hit harder becomes a leitmotif throughout the book, appearing spontaneously in Agassi’s head over decades, during matches, during hospital-room visits. His father’s words have been incorporated into his very cells.

The choice to omit quotation marks, for all its apparent radicalism — the grammatical version of Agassi’s signature Def Leppard haircut — turns out to be an act of bare and vulnerable honesty. All dialogue belongs, finally, to the author, just as all perception belongs, finally, to the perceiver. We stand at the baseline alone.