Europeans are thus being asked within a generation to convert from a European to an American concept of nationhood, but without a history of politically servicing this more absorptive, fluid definition. Most European countries haven’t fostered an “idea” of the sort that theoretically unifies Americans. British politicians often talk up “British values,” but aside from a vague sense of fair play and a devotion to queueing, most Brits would be hard-pressed to identify what these values are. Only France has a similar idea of itself as committed to liberty, equality, and fraternity, which is why the French state refuses to track the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup. Otherwise, in European nations whose citizens aren’t apt to get sentimental about their legal systems, the concept of a country seems to be shrinking to a patch on a map.

  Hence the rise not only of nationalism but also of usage of the word “nationalism” as a synonym for bigotry. (“Ethnonationalism” in most instances is a more accurate word.) The conflict over immigration in Europe is fundamentally an argument over the concept of country. Lest you dismiss all these prejudiced, closed-minded ethnonationalists as backward-looking and disgusting, it’s worth asking whether an Italy that no longer has more than a handful of Italians in that zabaglione sense—a country that, for argument’s sake, is abundantly populated by Chinese people eating moo shu pork—really remains “Italy,” even if the place—the patch on the map—is still there.

  We native-born Americans now have to put our genuine inclusiveness where our mouths are. We have been talking the talk for decades. We’ve long thought of our people as dynamically various, even if until very recently we weren’t nearly as various as we imagined. We’re conflicted over what to do when Club USA is oversubscribed, but at least the national narrative can accommodate newcomers in quantity. Europeans historically haven’t adopted the same story, making mass immigration far more consequential. Intriguingly, I’ve had multiple conversations with progressive Americans who have no quarrel with high levels of immigration to the United States, but who express quiet queasiness about substantial, largely Muslim immigration to Europe. They’re attached to the idea that Germans eat schnitzel and read Heinrich Böll. These otherwise intelligent progressives are embarrassed by that discomfort. By implication, European nations, which many white Americans still regard as their ancestral homelands, have an obligation to stay the same, like natural history museum dioramas, so that we can visit.

  Having deliberately committed to another country, as opposed to lazily acquiescing to fate like the native born, many recent immigrants are especially passionate about their new home and less likely to take its benefits for granted. Yet the very etymology of “patriotism”—from the Greek word patrios, meaning “of one’s father”—is deeply entwined with lineage. In a world on the move that is increasingly severing the concept of country from a recognizable people, Americans can cling to their national idea for coherence, if not always for cohesion. Most Europeans have no such anchor.

  Catholic Latino immigrants in the United States should be able to assimilate into a traditionally Christian country with relative grace, while Asian Americans have been getting with the program with such alacrity that they’re beating the white majority at its own economic game. Africans and Middle Easterners migrating to Europe cross a greater cultural chasm.

  As Europe’s dominant cultures grow increasingly dilute, denunciation of all who want to preserve the original character of their countries as “nationalist,” meaning “bigoted,” has a truth to it, but not the whole truth. (In Turkey, Hungary, and Poland, the greater problem than nationalism is autocracy.) Country-as-patch-on-the-map doesn’t inspire much fervor. Given the demographics of this century, the continuance of an incoming tide from the Continent’s south is probably inevitable. That shouldn’t preclude forgiving some Europeans for their sense of loss.

  Part IV

  Getting the Blood Running

  “Ode to the Hacker”

  Prospect, 2011

  From running all winter, I have a hamstring injury. Recent efforts to rehabilitate the muscles have been laced with hysteria. Trying to keep my thigh warm, I wear three pairs of cycling shorts under my jeans all day, and I wear all three pairs to bed. This hysteria has nothing to do with yearning to return to my regular running course along the Thames, mind. No, I have a deadline: 15 June, when I fly to New York for virtually the exclusive purpose of PLAYING TENNIS.

  The sport may not quite constitute my reason for living, but it comes close. My father taught me to play. He was a restless, ambitious man who squandered little time on family outings. The exception was tennis. About once a week in summer we’d decamp to nearby courts, where my father’s type-A personality eased to the far end of the alphabet. No longer tense, irritable, and distracted, he became patient, graceful, and relaxed—almost languid. So from the start I associated tennis with redemption. Within that charmed rectangle lay an alternative universe where the cares and anxieties beyond its perimeter vanished.

  In its rudiments, tennis is sublimely simple, and the uninitiated might reasonably be baffled by what is so compelling about repeatedly batting a pressurized sphere across a divide. Yet manipulating a tennis ball is nefariously subtle and addictively difficult. On a summer’s first day of play, I never know if the deadly flick of my wrist on the forehand’s follow-through will plague me for half an hour or the whole season.

  As a physical experience, tennis is uniquely satisfying. I’d never slander scrambling for a dastardly drop shot with the onerous label “exercise,” though finishing three hours of rallying wilted from exhaustion is part of the satisfaction. It’s fabulous to be able to thwack anything that hard, over and over, and not get arrested. The twang of the ball on the strings delivers the same percussive gratification of plopping a stone into a pool, popping a fresh pea pod, or snapping together the components of a new computer printer without breaking their plastic tabs.

  The game may be as mental as it is physical, but playing it well entails making the brain shut up. At my worst, my head is crowded with imperatives—first and foremost, though you’d think this would go without saying, WATCH THE BALL! Then: Step into the shot! Hit the ball in front of you! Get your racket back! But these clamoring edicts are an impediment to obeying them. They so clutter my mind that I might as well have strewn a clatter of gardening tools on the court itself.

  Why is having hit the ball correctly thousands of times before never any guarantee of hitting it properly this time? That is the central puzzle of tennis, a mystery on parade at Wimbledon as well as in public parks. Even professionals will abruptly futz a shot they’ve hit dazzlingly since they were five.

  Part of the answer is that there is no “this shot.” Any impression of having hit a ball before is an illusion. “Baseline forehand” is a crude umbrella under which cluster a constellation of infinitely various circumstances. Geometrical elements make every shot distinctive: angle, velocity, spin, and bounce. More interestingly, emotional variables equally pertain. How confident do you feel today? Did you lose the last point? Did you lose the last ten points? Are you still a little pissed off that your partner showed up fifteen minutes late? Are you focused, or merely telling yourself to focus? That is, are you dwelling fully in the moment, or did you just start debating lamb patties versus haddock for dinner?

  For tennis tantalizingly offers perfect inhabitation of the present tense, what drummers call playing “in the pocket.” During brief, intoxicating periods of hitting at the top of your game, the mental cacophony quiets, and there’s no longer any space between “telling yourself” to do something and doing it. This flow state seems like not thinking. In fact, it is perfect thinking.

  Alas, then there’s the rest of the time—for me, most of the time. The remainder of any given session comprises varying degrees of disappointment in myself, lending tennis a potentially volatile character. To my chagrin, for years I despoiled many a voluptuous summer afternoon with anything from sullen dyspepsia to full-blown rage. I could grow so disgusted with my ineptitude that I’d begin to lose points on purpose—as punishment for losing the one before.

  Were tennis a solo pursuit, temper tantrums would constitute mere existential waste. But one of the charms and challenges of the sport is that it’s played with someone else. The bond with that ally-cum-adversary across the net is so particular that Abraham Verghese dedicated an excellent memoir to the relationship: The Tennis Partner.

  The implicit romance of the tennis partnership is consummated in my sixth novel, Double Fault, in which two professional players wed. The woman, Willy, is so heartbroken when her initially less accomplished husband first beats her on the court (on their first anniversary, no less) and later beats her in the rankings that she destroys both loves in her life: her marriage, and tennis. Given my self-destructive emotional history on court, it’s pretty easy to infer where I got the idea for the book.

  Yet the seminal tennis partner in my own life is not my husband. I’ve played for thirty-five years with a man I met in graduate school, S., who doubles as my best friend in America. We do other things together, but tennis, and our mutual passion for it, forms the core of our friendship. (Although S. is a whore, and plays with lots of other people, of whom I am prone to grow jealous.) When S. lost a whole season to a dropped metatarsal, I was so bereaved I might have been limping myself. In kind, S. is keeping tabs on my hamstring. His concern is selfish. I take that as a compliment: he’s been looking forward to playing with me. Which is astonishing, considering how ill behaved I often grew in the olden days. S. put up with grumbling, curses, equally scalding periods of total silence, balls thrashed furiously at the fence, and even, when my self-hatred spilled over the net, glares of unqualified loathing.

  Inexplicably, a few years ago my rages lifted. These days I am cheerful on court, appreciative of my partner’s winners, and almost forgiving of my shortcomings. After blowing a sitter, I’m less apt to cuss than laugh. The makeover is befuddling. Though as a fiction writer I capitalize on the conceit that people are capable of transformation, I don’t really believe we can be born again. In real life, I find character depressingly constant.

  Nevertheless, at least on a tennis court, I have profoundly changed. Every afternoon the sky is clear, S. is free, and we meet by the bike racks in Fort Greene Park I regard as a blessing. If I have a pernicious problem with my forehand follow-through, I will continue to work on it, and exult in the occasions on which my follow-through is smooth. Maybe it’s finally got through to me that my remaining summers are terrifyingly few. At fifty-four, I no longer take mobility for granted. In future if it’s not my hamstring it will be my Achilles, bursitis, or some scrofulous cancer. I’m actively grateful to still be able to swing a racket, to run full tilt for a deep corner backhand and make it about half the time.

  I don’t credit myself for this reform. I didn’t “work on” my temperament. A tranquil, airy demeanor simply descended on me like a gift. Perhaps, with that quality of redemption I first identified in my father as a child, the ebullient spirit of tennis itself has finally worked its magic. Look, it whispers in my ear over Fort Greene Park in a sweltering July. The sun is high and hot on your shoulders. The leaves of the maples are rustling. The sock of the ball in the sweet spot resonates deep in your diaphragm. Your feet are light. On breaks, the cold tap water in your rinsed-out Campari bottle tastes better than champagne. Your partner is, in his way, a beloved. When you are finished, deliciously tired, you will sit on your usual bench and talk about your day. This is life, this is good life, this is as good as life can be.

  “London’s Unofficial Olympic Sport”

  The Atlantic, 2012

  Impatient with passivity, you’ve taken a break from the 2012 Olympics to wend along the Embankment on one of London’s “Boris Bikes,” a public rental fleet colloquially named for Boris Johnson, the boisterous, flop-haired Conservative mayor who introduced them. Be forewarned: the moment you straddle the chunky frame and broad saddle—the bicycle equivalent of a dray horse—you’re no longer a spectator. You’ve joined the games.

  In London, urban cycling is an Olympic sport. Without exception, members of the city’s farcically dubbed “cycling community” despise one another, starting with visitors on Boris Bikes—whom local cyclists delight in leaving behind in a muddy splatter. Resident pedal pushers resent that City Hall has squandered civic energies on a fleet for tourists, while many of the sporadic “bike lanes” along London’s narrow, parked-up roads still extend no longer than ten feet. Whenever a resource is scarce—in this case, space—Darwinism prevails, and only the fittest survive.

  When the Tube shut down following the terrorist attacks of 7/7, many Londoners dragged rusted, flat-tired hulks from the cellar to get to work. Discovering that bikes were faster and cheaper than the priciest public transport in Europe, many of these commuters kept biking. The bicycle has also become the ultimate fashion accessory, furnishing a haughty eco-sanctimony that a handbag simply cannot provide. Officially, the number of the city’s cyclists has tripled since I moved here in 1999; by my unofficial estimate, that number has burgeoned by more like a factor of ten. Cyclists accumulate in packs, revving edgily at lights in quantities of twenty to twenty-five, toes twitching on pedals like Formula One drivers’ feet on the gas at the starting line.

  With the Olympics, the capital’s derailleur delirium is bound to intensify. Road closures could set London traffic in concrete, inspiring yet more couch crumpets to clue up to the efficiencies of two wheels. As wide-screen images of Saluki-slim cyclists whipping around the new velodrome in East London strobe every pub, loads of potbellied punters are bound to fancy that they, too, can prance the capital pigeon-toed in clip-in bike shoes. Meanwhile, the streets will coagulate with sluggish, wide-eyed tourists on Boris Bikes.

  So newbies to this scene better wise up quick to rule number one here: that submitting to another slender tire ahead of you is an indignity on a par with taking it up the backside with a cricket bat. I’ve biked dozens of American states and all over Western Europe, and nowhere have I encountered a cycling culture so cutthroat, vicious, reckless, hostile, and violently competitive as London’s. In comparison, New York City’s cyclists are genteel, pinkie-pointing tea sippers who potter the West Side with parasols demurring, “No, after you, dear.” Bafflingly, Londoners’ adrenal outrage at being stuck behind any other bike is universal. Purple-faced octogenarians on clanking three-speeds, schoolkids with handlebars plastered in Thomas the Tank Engine decals, and gray-suited salarymen on tiny-wheeled fold-up Bromptons alike will all risk mid-intersection coronaries to overtake any other bicycle with the temerity to be in front. To stir this frenzied sense of insult, you needn’t be slow, either. You need simply be there.

  Mind, nearly all these wheezing challengers are converts, and converts are zealots. They are not merely people who bicycle; they are Cyclists—an identity so embracing that to overtake is to desecrate their deepest sense of self. (Our most inflammatory scenario: any male being passed by a girl, who might as well have brandished a scalpel for curbside castration.) So forget any fraternal nods or offers to lend pumps for punctures. Wary, antagonistic, and insecure, these fanatics never meet one another’s eyes, much less do they exchange pleasantries when accumulating side by side.

  If motorists find cyclists’ self-destructive behavior inexplicable, there’s often an obvious reason why, say, fifteen cyclists just veered in front of a bus on Waterloo Bridge: they’re trying to get ahead of each other. They’re not even thinking about the traffic. Operating in their separate, cog-eat-cog world, Londoners on two wheels forget all about the real enemy: the kind that gets about on four.

  Consequently, I’ve grown reluctantly more sympathetic with the city’s drivers, who revile cyclists almost as much as cyclists revile each other. During rush hours, clouds of gnats in helmets teem at stoplights, in the unusual instance that they don’t run the light in a swarm. Cyclists thread perilously through multilane tailbacks, filling crevices in traffic like grout between tiles. Intent only on passing some wally with bulging panniers up ahead, cyclists veer without warning into outer lanes, absent the merest glance over the shoulder. Capitalizing on clout in numbers, dozens of bikes obstruct cars that have the right-of-way while streaking through the hectic roundabout of Hyde Park Corner. London cyclists think nothing of overtaking another bike stealthily on the inside without so much as a ding-a-ling—a formula for collision. They cruise alongside a two-ton lorry right in the trucker’s blind spot, and then when the lorry turns left and grinds them predictably into biomass everyone is still supposed to feel sorry for them. The London Times has used the city’s sixteen cycling fatalities last year to galvanize a safety campaign, but the real wonder is that bodies aren’t piling up in gutters by the thousands.

  Other longtime veterans in cities abruptly churning with fevered nouveau cyclists will share my dismay. I discovered the bicycle in 1965. Having biked for primary transportation ever since, I’ve nothing to prove, and just want to get where I’m going, preferably with my head attached. Cycling was once my little secret—a sly eccentricity that explained my uncannily punctual arrival at any appointment. While the great unwashed lavished fortunes on train tickets, car repairs, and taxis, I saved a bundle. I got my exercise, while after a prolonged, miserable journey home the proles had to face the prospect of yet another odious trip to a stuffy, jam-packed gym.

  My secret is out.

  Were I ever genuinely motivated to cycle in order to save the environment, I’d be joyous that so many of my fellow Londoners have followed in my low-carbon tire tracks. Instead I’m resentful. My territory has been invaded. For me, cycling used to be contemplative, solitary, while lately in London I’m apt to get drafted into an impromptu race to the death with multiple members of my “community” at three a.m. These days, I shove off on even the briefest of rides with dread.