Pedaling Uphill, on a Bike and in a Marriage

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/books/review-we-begin-our-ascent-joe-mungo-reed.html

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Joe Mungo Reed has the sort of triple-barreled name that often comes attached to a certain kind of disheveled country music star, a Ray Wylie Hubbard or a Billy Joe Shaver or a Robert Earl Keen, men you can imagine Jeff Bridges playing in the movies.

His middle name, Mungo, has American literary resonances. It made me recall the great Raymond Mungo, the counterculture journalist turned Vermont communard and the author of shyly winning memoirs with titles like “Famous Long Ago” and “Total Loss Farm.”

But scratch all that. Reed is young and English and ungrizzled. And no relation to Raymond. Based on the aloof, punishing control he displays in his small, tight bud of a first novel, “We Begin Our Ascent,” he doesn’t appear to have a disheveled bone in his body.

“We Begin Our Ascent” is a bicycling novel. It’s about a 29-year-old man, Sol, who is a professional rider in the Tour de France. He’s one of those bright-shirted fellows who, as Joseph O’Neill put it in his novel “Netherland,” “zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.”

A salient fact about Sol is that he’s not the star of his cycling team, nor does he particularly care to be. As his coach, the amoral Rafael, says to Sol and his teammates about the team’s best rider:

“Obviously, you are supporting Fabrice. Shield him from the wind, bring him water, give him your bike if he punctures. If it makes you happy, make an inspirational speech about how much you believe in him and slap him on the bottom.”

Sol isn’t bitter about his subaltern status. He’s a stoic, an existential drone, a man who doesn’t crave notoriety and has strict internal standards. What he aims for is “not the podiums or flowers or paychecks (or not only them), but the feeling of justified exhaustion, the satisfaction of having done what was asked of me.”

It’s one of the indices of Reed’s talent that you hotly flip this book’s pages even when there’s not a lot going on, when it’s just another hilly day on the tour.

Though Reed has never been a professional rider himself, he’s a sensitive writer about the quiddities of professional cycling. He remarks that cyclists never drink the water that spectators proffer because, who knows, any stranger might be a saboteur or a psychopath.

He scrutinizes cyclist’s bodies. “We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.” He has a feeling for the systole and diastole, the contraction and release, of a body’s mechanisms.

He writes especially keenly about life in the peloton, the main pack of cyclists who cluster together to save energy by coasting in each other’s slipstreams.

Sol senses a distinct sort of power “when one is enclosed within the peloton, between those other bodies, part of a mass, rolling amorphously along the road like a drop of water down a pane of glass.” On bad days he feels “like a Victorian unfortunate caught in a factory apparatus.”

The story of Sol’s tour is braided with a love story. He’s been married for nearly three years to Liz, a research biologist. They have a young son. Back home in England, Liz watches his races on the television, searching for him in the pack.

Without pressing too hard, this novel proposes the peloton as a metaphor for marriage. Spouses take turns shielding one another from wind and rain; there’s an intuitive sense of when it’s time to hold back or advance.

This novel derives its power from its limited focus and direct language. There are no adipose, word-glutted sentences. Reed is mostly content to give us strong silk thread, absent pearls.

This novel’s darkness, like heart disease, sneaks up on you. Sol’s team does some mild doping. Tiny doses of testosterone are doled out from an eyedropper at the end of the day to aid recovery. It’s no big deal, Rafael explains. “The ancient Greeks used to use testosterone,” he says. “They used to eat ram’s testicles before a race.”

The exhausted team members are also sometimes injected with blood, harvested from them at the height of training and replete with red cells, that has been kept frozen for this purpose.

Sol has qualms about the microdosing and the other procedures. At the same time, he doesn’t wish to let his teammates down. Among the questions this novel asks is: How much of a person’s existence does he owe to others and how much can he keep for himself?

There is a breakdown in the supply chain for the performance enhancers. Liz happens to be traveling to France. Rafael proposes her as a mule.

Sol is upset, and convinced Liz will never participate. Rafael reaches out to her anyway.

Absorbing the shift of events that ensues, a reader’s mind may turn to the Louise Glück poem in which she declares, “I expected better of two creatures / who were given minds.”

Like a racer, Reed carefully husbands his resources in this ruthless little sports novel. He enlists our mind in Sol’s project as an athlete. He sees the madness in it as well.

“What kind of adult,” one of Liz’s friends asks, “worries about how fast he can ride his bike?” Sol and the other cyclists lust, pathetically, for the shiny little stickers Rafael hands out for strong efforts.

The focus here is narrow, and mean. We learn little, for example, about Sol’s background. Small details are given room to resonate. Like Sol on race day, Reed cuts out distractions as if they were cancer.