“THERE’S ALWAYS THIS YEAR: ON BASKETBALL AND ASCENSION” by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House, 352 pages, $32).
With good books, you recommend titles to your friends; with great ones, you stop friends in hallways to read passages aloud. By that standard, Hanif Abdurraqib’s “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension” is indisputably great. Books like this one perform that rarest of functions, not simply expanding readers’ minds but augmenting their mental repertoires. Abdurraqib captures the flickering moments when the eternal can be apprehended before it all recedes into chaos.
“There’s Always This Year” is a hybrid — part meditative essay on the poetics of basketball and part memoir of growing up in Columbus, Ohio, in the 1990s — that reads like prose poetry. Abdurraqib, recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for verse and criticism, is at his best when he freezes a scene and expatiates on its manifold meanings. In one early passage (the “First Quarter,” as he puts it), he describes a game between Columbus’ Brookhaven High and Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary, a powerhouse led by LeBron James, already a national media superstar. Amid the back-and-forth struggle of the surprisingly competitive contest, Abdurraqib pauses to depict the signature shot of Brookhaven’s star player, the 5-foot-7 Andrew Lavender.
“The floater, the most romantic shot in the game when done right, guided toward the rim with a heave and a wish, how the follow-through after the ball leaves the hand can look like an overeager wave, like saying goodbye to a person you never wanted to leave,” Abdurraqib writes. The floater “turns the ball into a bit of a show-off, obsessed with drama, almost pausing in the air to make sure you get its good side before it begins to twirl downward.”
When he’s not illuminating the game’s aesthetics, Abdurraqib explores the semiotics of basketball, analyzing how court images accrue cultural meanings. Though he feels a native Ohioan’s distaste for Michigan, he loved the Wolverines’ Fab Five from the early ’90s, particularly a photo of the stars as freshmen, unsmiling. “[T]here they do not look bereft of joy,” Abdurraqib says. “They look mostly like teenagers. Certain of their invincibility.”