Playing Days, By Benjamin Markovits

This account of life with an anonymous German basketball team offers an astute anatomy of failure

Benjamin Markovits is a four-time novelist who writes for the TLS and London Review of Books, among others. So far, so literary. But he is also able to dunk. In his early twenties, looking for a job that would give him time to write, he took the unusual step of going pro with a minor European basketball team. Playing Days recounts the 1996-97 season he spent with TG Landshut, a German second-division side, and his first steps into adulthood in a rural town near Munich, away from the homes of his childhood in Texas and London.

This unusual autobiographical episode is lit up by Markovits' eye for psychological and social detail. The Landshut squad has 12 players in it, some American and some German, a hotchpotch of talented college players and over-the-hill veterans. Markovits is alive to the oddness of their association, as well as his own place among them: "Most of these guys weren't where they wanted to be, and every loss reminded them of the fact that they belonged where they were." The squad is divided into the starting five and the rest, and Markovits is among the latter. He is to pass the season on the substitutes' bench.

This is one of the many ways that Playing Days is the obverse of your average ghostwritten sports biog. It is an anatomy of failure: "Relativity is one of the miseries of the minor leagues. When you lose, it isn't just your opponent who beats you, but everybody else in the leagues above you." One player experiences a red mist in big games and, in a phrase characteristic of the book – both modest and piercing – Markovits says he "thought it strangely sad that [this player's] great desire to win was not helpful to him". Even when Landshut start winning and gain promotion, Markovits himself has only played a bit part, and is told that his services are no longer required – his coach can't see him cutting it in the top division.

Of course this is sweetened because we know Markovits has another string to his bow; we have in our hands evidence of his versatility and power as a prose writer. Gone here are the arch narratorial convolutions of his acclaimed Byron fictions Imposture and A Quiet Adjustment, in place of a voice closer to that of his 2009 Pushcart Prize-winning short story "Another Sad, Bizarre Chapter in Human History". Both matter of fact and acutely observant, it wears its wisdom with a shrug.

If, in certain parts, this light touch feels a little too light and certain elements are skipped over – Markovits' Jewish grandparents fled from nearby Munich, for example, and he comes to quick conclusions on this, just as he does the Oedipal undertones of his relationship with the girlfriend of one of his senior teammates – we certainly don't want a biographer to pretend his subject understood the full significance of things as he was doing them.

Overall, whether writing on questions of class, race, language, cultural difference, or the people who touched him during the year, Markovits is unquestionably a sharpshooter.