Tennis el floppo

Press, 31 May 1986, Page 20

Tennis el floppo

De Alfonce Tennis: the Superlative Game of Eccentric Champions, its History, Accoutrements, Rules, Conduct and Regimen. By J. P. Donleavy. Flamingo, 1985. 223 pp. $12.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Glyn Strange) De Alfonce tennis, the story goes, originated in the late 1930 s when a group of 14 oarsmen invented an indoor game called Bangokok Boxo Ball as an alternative to their usual training schedule. For 11 years the game was played with increasing sophistication and gusto. Then, on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, 13 of the players disappeared at sea while on a pleasure cruise. Their memory was kept alive by the lone survivor, “the Fourteenth,” one Horatio Josiah De Alfonce Adams IV. He, in his “last will and testicle” (schoolboy jokes are unashamedly used), requests that “J.P.” preserve for posterity the rules of the game. The "Rules” suggest that the game is a mixture of tennis as we know it and the ancient indoor game of "real” (or royal) tennis, with a few extra complications. Perhaps fittingly, since De Alfonce tennis is said to be less a game than a way of life, these rules are the most boring part of the book. The sections on Accoutrements and Conduct are little better, but that on “Regimen” contains a lot of readable fun at the expense of the modern obsession with dietary intake and consequent bodily functions. The first De Alfonce tennis match

proper was played in 1983 between J.P. and Laura, a beautiful English rose. Aided by the biased umpiring of Lord Charles, the indiscriminatingly urinating English peer (another schoolboy joke), Laura wins. The “History” of the game of De Alfonce tennis is therefore the build-up to this climactic match, but it is unnecessarily long and too tediously farcical to sustain the reader’s interest. Donleavy has enough funny ideas to sink a ship, but this seems to be his undoing: he does not dwell long enough on any one of them to be able to develop it fully. Donleavy’s style is odd. He holds as much respect for the rules of grammar as John McEnroe has for line umpires. Misrelated participles, broken sentences and confusingly comma-less clauses abound, and he can veer from elevated diction to slang at the drop of a hat. Sometimes these idiosyncrasies are funny, but usually, as with much of the farcical detail, Donleavy seems not to have the intellectual grasp that can lift mere high jinks to the level of worthwhile and enduring comedy. It is a very odd book indeed, and contains therein its own fascination. It could be best described by a term from its own Glossary, “el floppo,” which denotes “an awful dismal flop for Which the perpetrator is vividly remembered.” One is tempted to get hold of another book by the same author just to see if he is always so spectacular in his failures.