A SHARP ENDLESS NEED, by Marisa Crane
In his 2024 book “There’s Always This Year,” the writer Hanif Abdurraqib describes tempering his friends’ optimism as the Cleveland Cavaliers headed into Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals. The team was down 3-1, and though his fellow Cavs fans were holding out for a comeback, Abdurraqib had already accepted defeat.
“I prefer being accelerated to the front row of my undoing,” he writes.
That line hovered in my mind as I read “A Sharp Endless Need,” the second novel by Marisa Crane (who now goes by Mac), not only because Abdurraqib is quoted in the book’s epigraph, or because both authors write (deftly, ruinously) about basketball. The echo was in the self-conviction: the athlete and the fan, chasing the game to exquisite heartbreak.
“A Sharp Endless Need” follows the star point guard Mack Morris, a high school senior in small-town Pennsylvania in 2004. Reeling after the sudden death of her father and hounded by college scouts, Mack is primed for disaster when a transfer student, Liv Cooper, joins her team as shooting guard. The two instantly become enmeshed, both on and off the court, in the kind of obsessive, ravenous friendship that only two closeted teenagers could have. The question is whether the relationship will send Mack to new heights or fuel her devastation.
In a tight 250 pages, Crane’s writing drives forward hard and fast. They mix their staccato sentences with strategic bursts of tender lyricism. Crane, who played college ball, describes Mack’s games with an insider’s fluency, bringing readers into the minute-by-minute drama on the court. But knowledge of the sport isn’t required to understand the novel; all you need is a familiarity with loving something to the point of pain.
“As long as I had the game, I would be OK,” Mack thinks. “There would be a place for me that existed outside of human curses like attraction and desire.”
These human curses, along with scourges of disappointment and unrealized selves, fill Mack’s world, from washed-up coaches and dissatisfied parents to teenagers wrestling with forbidden wants. In Crane’s hands, Mack’s account of this confusing period as a teenager is deeply affecting: She’s too consumed with the brightness and immediacy of Liv to engage with her deeper wounds. She chases away her anxiety with alcohol, drugs and punishing drills, careening toward everything but what she wants most intimately. She watches longing unravel everyone around her, and she keeps playing, funneling her frustration into the game, accelerating to her own undoing.
From the front row, we can’t tear our eyes from the vortex of passion between Mack and Liv. As Crane writes it, sports are a vessel for desire. They’re erotic, an excuse to shield lust and the means by which it’s played out. On the court, Mack and Liv have the unstoppable chemistry of two ambitious athletes whose greatness coaxes out the best in each other. Outside the game, they toe the line between friendship and something more, with their locker room showers and ice baths and late-night AIM conversations. Together they’re vital, insatiable, inseparable, undeniable, yet always avoiding the truth of their attraction. We keep watching them because, like any devoted sports lover, we can’t help wondering if they might pull out a win.
But Crane’s final play is an unexpectedly hopeful question: Is losing really the end?
Most of the book focuses on the misery and destruction of desire, but despite its title, “A Sharp Endless Need” offers the possibility that unsatisfied wanting does not always have to cut and curse, at least not endlessly. We give it the power to destroy us when we deny it or repress it. Maybe, with time and understanding, unmet desire can simply be an L in the column. Good game.
A SHARP ENDLESS NEED | By Marisa Crane | Dial Press | 256 pp. | $27
The post In This Queer Sports Novel, Basketball Is Both Desire and Destruction appeared first on New York Times.
