Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season - Hardcover

In his earlier work, David Shields came across as a fairly traditional storyteller. Even Dead Languages, his fictional rumination on a stutterer's tongue-tied existence, was essentially a coming-of-age story. But he began to show his true colors with Remote, a fractured, full-body immersion in media culture. This deeply amusing work of nonfiction revealed the author to be a neurotic, navel-gazing cousin of Nicholson Baker. Now comes Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, whose putative topic--professional basketball--would seem to return Shields to his extroverted roots. (His first novel, in fact, revolved around a college basketball player.) Yet this is ultimately as postmodernist a work as its predecessor, and it takes us not only into the author's heart but his boudoir. Black Planet's fusion of public spectacle with private mortification makes it his funniest book to date.

A word of explanation: technically speaking, Black Planet is a chronicle of the Seattle SuperSonics during the 1994-1995 season. Since the team blew its shot at the playoffs, there's no chance for an uplifting grand finale. Yet Shields had a different sort of hoop dream in mind from the very beginning. "The NBA," he writes, "is a place where, without ever acknowledging it--and because it's never acknowledged, it's that much more potent and telling--white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. Race, the league's taboo topic, is the league's true subject." It's the author's true subject, too, and he goes at it from every angle--attending games, recording call-in radio shows, and making some abortive attempts to cozy up to the players. Point guard Gary Payton is his true Penelope. Why? Well, his motormouth style does suggest an "indivisibility... of playing and talking, of life and language." But more to the point, he offers a handy tabula rasa for Shields's fantasy life, a trash-talking personification of bad behavior: "Which is why, in Seattle the Good, I so love Gary Payton. He's not really bad, he's only pretend-bad--I know that--but he allows me to fantasize about being bad."

If Shields were simply slapping society on the wrist for its half-submerged racism, Black Planet would wear out its welcome in the first quarter. But he's consistently hardest on himself, so the book becomes not only a social critique but a critique of social critiques, cutting the ground from under itself in an infinite and entertaining loop-the-loop. Shields may not be the first writer to transform a fan's notes into literary gold--Frederick Exley beat him to the punch--but he's the most rigorously intelligent one in a long, long time. Swish! --James Marcus

"Black Planet [is] a risky and brilliant book. . . . It compares favorably to Frederick Exley's classic A Fan's Notes. It is an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness. . . . Shields [is] willing to write himself naked about the hungers and envies that move across the grandstand like the wave."        
--Robert Lipsyte, The New York Times

"In Black Planet, David Shields honestly (and ironically) uses himself as a test subject to peel away the layers of personal need, sexual longing, cultural sedimentation, alienation, and blatant prejudice that make even a season of the Seattle SuperSonics a disturbing microcosm of America's 300-year-old Race War. You don't need to be a sports fan to experience this book as a rare, troubling map of the seldom charted, subterranean regions of the souls of white folks."        
--Charles Johnson

"Black Planet is a funny, wickedly observant, highly intelligent book about Us and Them--I and Thou, black and white, male and female, parent and child, spectator and star."        
--Jonathan Raban

"Black Planet offers us a sometimes moving, often funny, and always absorbing account of a season in pro basketball--in which we learn much about one team but even more about those volatile forces, including racism, greed, vanity, and ignorance, that make the NBA such a compelling metaphor for American culture today."        
--Arnold Rampersad

"Black Planet is an extraordinary, unique, and utterly fascinating memoir/book. With unblinking honesty and unabashed affection for his subject, Shields makes a real contribution to the national non-discourse on race."
--Bob Shacochis

"A compulsively readable book. David Shields, as no writer before him, takes you into the obsessive mind of a sports addict: its shames and glories, over-identifications, repetitions, rationalizations, wonderments, and stoical detachment. I recognize myself only too well."         
--Phillip Lopate

"Black Planet says it's about basketball when it's actually that rare thing, an honest love song, White Man Loves Black Athlete--you know, the tune with the refrain, 'Dear NBA Genie, make me hip, angry, and always, always in control.' A song that's frank, embarrassing, and killingly funny."        
--Jay Cantor