THE SENSE OF WONDER

Romance and drama bloom around the NBA’s sole Asian American player.

For his fourth novel, Salesses takes some inspiration from the real-life story of Jeremy Lin, the Taiwanese American basketball player whose brief but phenomenal run for the New York Knicks in 2012 sparked a “Linsanity” craze. Here the player is Won Lee, an underappreciated Korean American point guard for the Knicks who capitalizes on a star player’s injury to lead a winning streak that the media punningly dubs the Wonder. Salesses alternates narration between Won and his girlfriend, Carrie, who’s a producer for K-dramas, Korean soap operas that have complex plots but operate within fairly rigid tropes As the Wonder inevitably fizzles, various dramas intensify, making the story a kind of K-drama itself. Won and Carrie are enmeshed in conflicts with an Asian American sports journalist manipulating the "Wonder" narrative, the injured Knicks star (nicknamed Powerball!), and both of their partners; accusations of infidelity abound. Woven among these troubles are a few of those K-drama tropes, not just boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, but more abstract matters of fate. (“K-drama shines,” Salesses writes, “in the tension between certainty and wonder.”) In time, Carrie tries to get a basketball-themed K-drama off the ground, which creates its own set of complications. Salesses’ story is admirably multilayered, blending smarts about basketball, television, and the varying shades of anti-Asian racism, though he's less persuasive in arguing that incredible plot twists—convenient deaths and resurrections, stock setbacks, and heartfelt reunions—are more true to life than the tropes suggest. Still, Salesses takes his source material from both basketball and TV seriously, and his storytelling is crisp while avoiding easy frothiness.

A smart, very meta take on love, sports, race, and media.