I recently finished “Carrie Soto is Back” by Taylor Jenkins Reid, picking it up after a friend recommended it to me because I like tennis. The book is about a (former) tennis star’s decision to return to the game 5 years after retiring in an effort to protect or reclaim her record for most Grand Slams. I’ve never read anything by TJR before, but I kind of knew what to expect in terms of character archetypes and plot, and that’s pretty similar to what I got. This isn’t really a review of Carrie Soto, but here’s my review: it’s good enough that I read it quickly and never considered quitting, but I did not become a TJR fan. Now, onto the stuff I really want to talk about!
Fictionalizing tennis in the world of Carrie Soto
In the world of Carrie Soto, the roster of professional tennis players is almost entirely fictional, and that mostly includes former stars as well. Carrie Soto, the main character, holds the record for most Grand Slams won, but Nicki Chan equals her record at the 1994 US Open with a victory over Ingrid Cortez. Of course, you can easily verify that the 1994 US Open was not contested by women named Ingrid Cortez and Nicki Chan; it was Arantxa Sánchez Vicario and Steffi Graf, neither of whom exist in Carrie Soto (or at least, they’re not tennis stars). Other greats from that moment, like Monica Seles, Gabriela Sabatini, Chris Evert, and Martina Navratilova, are also missing. Not even Billie Jean King is mentioned! Interestingly, some actual players do get mentioned—I recall a reference to Bjorn Borg’s failed attempt to come out of retirement, for example.
But this is fiction, of course, so who cares? I was not bothered by this in the slightest. I was certainly curious to consider who actually won the tournaments discussed in the book, but it was very easy for me to suspend my disbelief/knowledge for the purposes of this book. Frankly if anybody told me they couldn’t get into the book because it was rewriting tennis history, I’d find them totally unreasonable. I’ve never read sports fiction, but this has to be the bare minimum for the genre (unless authors get around it by never saying what year it is).
The mechanics of professional tennis: so much diving
While the book is mostly NOT tennis matches, Jenkins Reid does have to show some tennis, and so she writes direct play-by-play as well as summarizing playing experiences. In both types of writing, she reveals that the mechanics (for lack of a better word) of professional tennis in the world of Carrie Soto are not true-to-life.
- Carrie serves unrealistically fast. It’s much too fast for the era of tennis she played in (in the 70s and 80s) at over 120 mph. In fact, every player whose game is described in Carrie Soto has a fast serve and hits the ball hard, which oversimplifies the diversity of game styles that tennis allows. But fine, whatever, I’m actually not really bothered by this. It’s a fictional universe, and we’re supposed to believe that Carrie is a special talent anyway. So let her serve over 120 mph.
- Women and men do not really play each other. Carrie and Bowe, another older player and major supporting character in the book, end up becoming training mates, and Carrie regularly beats Bowe when they play practice matches. In the book, both players are elite-level— they are reaching the second week of Grand Slam tournaments. It’s just not likely that a male player who is competitive at Grand Slam level professional tennis would regularly lose to a female player who is competitive at Grand Slam tennis. Elite-level men and women don’t even practice together that often (not never, but not often!). Elite-level women likely travel with a male hitting partner, but hitting partners are not professional tennis players. They are just very good tennis players. But you know what? I also was not bothered by this. Again, Carrie is supposed to be special, so I say she can beat Bowe all she wants.
(Also, let me be clear: I am much more interested in women’s tennis than men’s tennis, and I don’t believe that direct competition between men and women should be a requirement for women to be professional athletes and be paid the same as men.) - Diving is spectacular but rare; most players do not dive for balls. In Jenkins Reid’s play-by-plays, players are constantly diving. This is very unrealistic. Most diving that happens in real-world tennis happens at the net when a player is trying to make a volley, but Jenkins Reid had players diving in baseline rallies and even trying to dive to return serves! Maybe Gaël Monfils would do something like this, but it’s also important to point out that whenever Monfils (or any other player) dives for a ball, it’s a big deal! So it could not be happening with such regularity. This is another thing that I was not bothered by (well, mostly!). Maybe tennis in the Carrie Soto universe is just so high stakes and exciting that players are willing to dive.
These details are not as easy to accept as the roster of fake players, but I can still accept them as part of the Carrie Soto universe. I mean, these are all statistical details anyway, and so it’s easy to imagine that the distribution of serve speeds, talent across gender, and umm… needing to dive… could be different in a fictional universe. Did it take me out of the story? Sometimes, but I can think something is kind of stupid without rejecting it as impossible. And I did!
Unbreakable rules in tennis (and geography)
What I could not accept—and what I was constantly taking pictures of and texting to my tennis-playing friends—was Jenkins Reid misunderstanding aspects of how a tennis match unfolds (scoring, changeovers) and not understanding or properly using relatively basic tennis jargon.
How tennis proceeds: set scoring and changeovers
There were three instances I recorded where moments in a Grand Slam tennis match are described, but those moments are not actually possible. I’m gonna kind of go into detail here for the benefit of non-tennis fans.
“I am sitting in my hotel room, watching Nicki play Andressa Machado. She has one set behind her; it’s 7-6 in the second. Machado is serving, and Nicki is running all over the court, making every shot.”
“7-6 in the second” only means one thing: the second set is over. That’s the score of a set when it has gone to a tiebreaker and the tiebreaker is completed. It’s pretty clear that Jenkins Reid did not intend to communicate that the second set was over— so it seems that she does not know that “It’s 7-6 in the second” is not something anybody would ever say about a modern tennis match. It could have just been 6-5 in the second set and then there wouldn’t be a problem.
“We are now tied 6-6 in the second set. She is serving for the set. She sends three kick serves in a row, and each one bounces differently. It knocks me out of my flow. The second set is hers.”
Similar to the last example, we’re dealing with a tiebreak set here. When a non-final set reaches a score of 6-6, a tiebreaker begins. When a tiebreaker is reached, there is no longer somebody “serving for the set” because players alternate serves during the tiebreaker. And no player would serve three times in a row in a tiebreaker (unless one of the serves was a fault or a let) because each player only serves two points in a row in a tiebreaker. All of this suggests that Jenkins Reid doesn’t know that at 6-6 in the second set, the players would go to a tiebreaker.
“It’s the final set, 4-4. … During the changeover, I sit down to drink my water. I breathe in deeply and close my eyes. I have to rethink my strategy here.”
Changeovers—where players get to sit down before continuing play on the other side of the court—occur at two times in tennis matches. First, there’s a changeover in between every set, no matter the score. Second, there is a changeover only after odd-numbered games. (After the first game of a set, players are technically supposed to switch sides without taking a break, but in practice, most professional tennis players will take a quick changeover after the first game of the set as well). A score of 4-4 is an even number of games, so there would not be a changeover at 4-4. Again, this is sort of a pointless detail to mess up; she could have just said it was 3-4, and the story would not be affected at all. But it demonstrates that she (and her editor) don’t understand how a tennis match progresses.
Games and matches
Since game is commonly used to refer to a complete contest (athletic or leisure), it would be nice if a complete tennis contest was also called a game. But game has a more specialized use in tennis, and so a different word is used for a complete contest: a match. For clarity, this is how tennis scoring proceeds: win the most points to win the game, win the most games to win the set, win the most sets to win the match. That’s where the saying “Game, set, match!” comes from: the player has won a point which won them the game, which won them the set, which won them the match.
Several times in Carrie Soto is Back, a character who really should know better (e.g., a professional player or renowned coach) would refer to a completed contest as a game. For example, Carrie’s father and coach Javier might have complimented her performance in the match by saying that she played a great “game.” The trouble with this inaccuracy is that there is a group of people who say things like this: people who don’t know very much about tennis. When these characters improperly use the term game when talking about a tennis match, they don’t just sound wrong; they sound like amateurs!
Break points
There also seems to be some confusion around the term “break point.” For newcomers, here’s a description of a break point. When you are the receiving (i.e., non-serving player) and you win enough points to be one point away from winning that game, you have now reached a break point. Essentially, “break point” means “if the receiver wins this point, they win the game.” Break points are notable because the default assumption in tennis is that it’s easier to win a game when you are serving than when you are receiving. So if you win a game as a receiver (or, in tennis jargon, if you break your opponent’s serve), it’s generally viewed as an indication that you are pulling ahead (or making a comeback).
I think TJR understands this, but there are also some uses of break point that I cannot interpret. Here’s another excerpt.
“Serve the ball, Carrie.”
With lightning speed, I toss it up in the air and slam it across the court. It flies from my racket straight across the net and into the ground. It bounces out of reach before Bowe gets to it.
“Break point,” I say.
“Goddammit,” Bowe says as he throws his racket.
I shake my head and start walking to the bench to drink some water.
This isn’t a break point! First, Carrie is serving, so if she gets into a position to win the game, it’s not a break point. It’s just a game point. Second, after the point, they both go back to the benches to drink some water, which suggests that Carrie’s ace has actually won her the game. I truly cannot understand what Carrie saying, “Break point,” is supposed to communicate here.
There are some other stray jargon issues I noted: using return for shots other than the return of serve, using groundstroke to indicate a kind of shot (nobody would say, “hits a groundstroke,” they would specify whether it was a forehand or backhand), and referring to winning “in two sets” when the only way people actually say that is “straight sets.” To me, these are facts about tennis and how tennis is discussed that are not up for interpretation or change, even in a fictionalized world.
Heading West from LA to Indian Wells…
OK there is just one other thing that really made me scratch my head. Carrie goes to the Indian Wells tennis tournament as a spectator to do some scouting. Indian Wells is one tier below Grand Slam— it’s a huge tournament where you can expect every top 10 player in attendance. It takes place in the California desert (the town is called Indian Wells, and it’s near Palm Springs) and from LA, the only way to get to Indian Wells is to drive EAST. When Carrie, her agent Gwen, and her dad leave LA to go to Indian Wells, Jenkins Reid writes: “[We] pack our suitcases into Gwen’s SUV and head west for Indian Wells.” I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Jenkins Reid was simply imagining a fictional version of California where Indian Wells is west of LA— I think she just doesn’t know!
You can’t make this up!
A straw man view of fiction would be to say that it’s “made up” or “not true or real.” Certainly some part of every work of fiction IS real (e.g., the characters respirate, have organs, talk to each other, …), and furthermore, there are entire genres of literature that focus on retelling or embellishing historical events. Fiction that is set in the actual world (or something very close to it) borrows parts of the real world to help us know the world of the book. So why does it seem to be the case that some parts of the real world (like the scoring system of tennis or the location of Indian Wells) must be kept?
The best I can come up with is that there needs to be a reason to make something up. Fictional characters are perhaps the easiest to accept because we know that we’re reading the novel to connect with characters (and probably also because most books have invented characters!). Historically inaccurate statistics may be too much for some to accept (as some reviews of this book contended), but we can also accept them if we understand/believe that Carrie Soto is remarkable— maybe this is a step away from magical realism (ha)? But the inaccurate scorelines and use of jargon in Carrie Soto serve no discernible purpose. So, while it should be possible for me as the reader to say, “Oh, the world of this book is different because it contains players like Carrie Soto and Bowe Huntley and also because tennis is scored differently and Indian Wells is in the Pacific Ocean,” that’s not where I go. I just think Taylor Jenkins Reid and her editor(s) don’t know enough about tennis and didn’t care about getting those details right (which, fine!).
Add this to your list of stories to lean on when you start to hear your inner perfectionist
Taylor Jenkins Reid is certainly a successful novelist, and this book was reasonably popular (though not popular enough to have its own Wikipedia page). I finally bought myself a copy after seeing that the ebooks at my public library were constantly checked out— people are reading this! And even as a tennis fan, I would still say I liked it enough! And look at all these thoughts I had about it!
Even though the book isn’t really “about tennis” in the end, I still think it’s interesting that these mistakes made it into the final story. That TJR was writing about Indian Wells and wrote “head west” and then didn’t say, “Oh, I better check whether that makes sense.” So the lesson for perfectionists out there is: it’s fine! You can write a successful book involving tennis even if you don’t really know that much about the game. Some people will care that you got some details wrong, but also plenty of people won’t care at all. So just remember that!
And, lastly, it made me curious about reading some tennis-based fiction where the tennis knowledge is actually correct! I’ll have to look into that…
