Taking the Shot

Many have written, earnestly and eloquently, about sports as salvation. And about their uneasy place in urban America’s consciousness. About how too many kids hang their hopes, their entire precarious futures on elusive dreams of fast money and the embrace of the spotlight.

For young men, sandlots or asphalt courts can, with enough imagination, become diamonds or buffed-to-gleaming gymnasiums: a distant but not unattainable dream.

But for young women who possess a gift of speed, agility, grace and a modicum of confidence, the chance of following that route up and out is even more remote.

For those who seize that chance, even “up and out” is like a fast break off a cliff, a body suspended in hang time over a yawning life chasm. For women who excel athletically (except, perhaps, at tennis or golf) find rewards scarce in the professional world on the other side.

This is just the incidental music in Nina Revoyr’s new novel, “The Necessary Hunger” (Simon & Schuster). One of many compelling themes wending through a complex smear of the politics of gender, sexual orientation, class and race, interracial friendship, interracial love, intolerance and acceptance, with Los Angeles and its frantic mix and contradictions as theater in the round.

The story is told as a not-always-longing backward look through the eyes of Nancy Takahiro, an Inglewood High senior and star forward, whose entire sphere of existence (when it isn’t diverted by Raina, the young woman and athletic equal who drives her to distraction) is the ritual of basketball:

[It] was more of a calling than a sport, it was . . . sustenance; it underpinned our lives. . . . Every Sunday morning, as I drove the 28 miles from our house in Inglewood to a gym in Cerritos, I saw well dressed people on their way to the churches, mosques and synagogues that were scattered throughout Southern California. . . . The only differences between my faith and theirs were that I wore workout clothes instead of my Sunday best and that I worshiped every day.

Pressing one’s body and spirit to their limits, Revoyr knows, has more import than a tally of impressive stats and gilded laurels at season’s end.

“When girls grow up they are socialized to be objects, to be looked at and acted upon,” says Revoyr from her home in Ithaca, N.Y. “Sports is where they act . . . in terms of positive things, instead of sexualized things. Studies show that if you are comfortable with your body, that translates into being comfortable in other things in your life and your career.”

In Nancy, her quietly conflicted, gently nuanced Japanese American protagonist, Revoyr has constructed the model post-restrictive housing covenant, post-white flight, post-upwardly mobile people of color flight, urban border town dweller.

“It was a very personal thing,” says Revoyr, who is of Japanese and Polish American descent and grew up in Los Angeles herself. “I wanted to talk about L.A.--the physical part of L.A. that doesn’t appear enough in fiction.”

Nancy’s feet are firmly planted on either side of the racial divide: living in the skin and traditions of her own culture and learning the rhythms of the dominant culture outside--the one that would most significantly augment her worldview:

It’s not that I ever forgot who I was, or that I wanted to. But I had no history yet--or rather, no sense of the history that I had. I was trying hard to be accepted, which meant trying to be black; I didn’t know, yet, what it meant to be Japanese.

Reflecting on process, Revoyr says: “I didn’t say, starting out, ‘I’m going to talk about all these issues.’ But . . . obviously in what I was writing about, all these things were going to come into play. It was very important for me to portray ideas about class and race. I just hoped that the implications would work out for themselves.”

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Revoyr grew up in Culver City, a crook of Los Angeles County that in many ways was an integrationist’s petri dish. A proving ground for all collected around its rim, that if this thing, this larger concept called integration was going to work--the seeds of its success would take root here where cultures convened, languages merged, and interest and identity ultimately intersect.

“Culver City is such a microcosm of the entire country,” says Revoyr, aware of the city’s rich mix of cultures--Irish, Cuban, Indian, Thai, Argentine--but equally aware that despite proximity, “Definitely people tend to stick with their own. One of the things that moved people out of their racial group was the sports team.”

Like Nancy, who finds a solid place among her African American teammates, Revoyr got off the social and literal sidelines by developing her physical prowess. Being 5 feet, 10 inches didn’t hurt.

Ultimately, her sense of self bloomed on the court and then transferred to the world beyond it.

The words “team” and “family” have fluid meaning in Revoyr’s novel, as the author explores the various forms of familial bonds: extended ties, unions by default or through common interest, drift or desire, and the risks one takes to protect those bonds.

Fittingly, the seeds of the novel sprouted after a family reunion of sorts.

“After college, I went back to Los Angeles . . . and one of the things in the book that pretty much came straight from life was that I went and played in an alumnae game. Out of all these people who I’d been kids with, I was the only one who had graduated from college,” she says, an edge of disbelief still piercing her voice. “I wasn’t in the same place as [my] former teammates . . . and that really made a difference.”

But Revoyr had faced her own life wall. An injury coupled with a cut in financial aid her second year at Yale forced her to consider her options. Initially depressed, “I became a writer, and channeled that energy somewhere else,” she says.

“My identity was so wrapped up in basketball--the sport, the team.” Losing that, she says in retrospect, “made me take everything else I did seriously. In the same way, watching Magic or Cheryl Miller excited me so much that I wanted to go and re-create the sensation by playing. Reading a certain author, like James Baldwin, gives me such a high that I want to go out and write immediately. It’s the same kind of thing. You want to emulate your heroes.”

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Her former teammates’ collective stories--women ensnared in dead-end jobs, weighted too early by children, blocked by bad choices--and the countermelody of independence and strength made her pause.

It was that knot Revoyr wanted to pick at. Nancy’s life is slashed with dualities: a consummate player and neighborhood star who is also a bundle of indecision and fear. Her identity--both racial and sexual--is something she buffets with bravado and mulls over in silence.

But already, Revoyr says, impatience straining her voice, critics are saying that her young women feel a little too comfortable with their sexuality (several on this hoops squad are lesbian).

“It’s interesting. I’ve gotten criticized for the kids being too comfortable with being gay . . . and some criticize me for [them] not being gay enough,” she says. “But when I was playing in high school, the gay kids were out to each other. There’s that bond. But they are not really out to the rest of the team.

“It was complicated because there were people dealing with some very real issues; there was definitely questioning; there were people not liking themselves, religion was a factor. Among a lot of the black players I knew, there was the whole sense of betraying the race so people had fronts; they had fake boyfriends who they took around to all the games. There was a lot of silence. And frankly, there is still a lot of silence about it. Not just in women’s basketball, but everywhere.”

What Revoyr wants to underscore, using the loose ends and tangles that are these young women’s lives, is that there are no easy resolutions, no neat categories.

The larger issue is about integrated lives. No one is defined solely by his or her race, gender, sexual orientation: And that’s why Revoyr feels so strongly about not being put in a box. “Identity and personhood is a complex thing . . . and it’s a real injustice to the complexity of people to define them in such limiting ways.”

When people talk about books, Revoyr says, “They talk about categories. I want mine to fit into so many different categories: sports, gay, Asian American, the city angle. I’m not hiding the fact that I’m gay, or that Nancy is gay, but I am concerned about being compartmentalized. It’s about so much more. You’re using a lesbian character to talk about city basketball, interracial relationships, class, poverty. . . .”

Because like a good athlete, a precision team is an integrated set of thoughts in motion. To echo Revoyr’s mantra: “You play the way you live . . . pure and complete.”