In her 2018 memoir You All Grow Up and Leave Me, the journalist Piper Weiss recalls her teenage years as a tennis player under the guidance of Gary Wilensky, who ran his own coaching company, Gary’s Girls and Guys Adult and Junior Tennis Programs, in New York City during the 1990s. Wilensky was not a professional tennis player, and he wasn’t even that talented on the court. What he did have, as Weiss explains, was “a natural ability to read people, easily detecting their strengths and weaknesses.” He also made tennis fun. Other coaches might bully or belittle young players, but Wilensky presented himself as “an entertainer, a clown with a sack full of gags, doling out carnival prizes on the courts, and showing up for lessons in the occasional costume.” At some point the Eastern Tennis Association named him coach of the year.

Like Weiss, I took lessons through Gary’s Girls and Guys, for several months starting when I was eight years old. Wilensky was never my teacher, but he was always around—a rumpled figure with an air of passive benevolence. He was also head coach for the tennis team at my all-girls private school, and I would often see him in the lobby, decked out in a polyester tracksuit that rustled as he walked. In late April 1993, as I sat at the kitchen table watching the evening news, I saw Wilensky’s name on the screen. He was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, just hours after trying and failing to kidnap one of his seventeen-year-old students. The police found a cabin Wilensky had rented in the Adirondacks, which New York magazine dubbed a “House of Horrors.” It was full of “sadomasochistic paraphernalia”: chains, handcuffs, a mask, a rubber sex doll.

Despite “all the diagnoses used to explain Gary’s mind-set,” Weiss writes, it is the doll that provides “the most visceral indication of what gripped him in his final days: his disconnect from real relationships, the conflicts of his desire, and his delusional belief that a young woman was an object he could fold up and store away.” This is a thoughtful way of saying that Wilensky was a loser. Adrift in the adult world, he played the champion with children and built a fantasy life premised on the illusion of his own competence. Grown-up intimacy was impossible: he had been married for six months in the late 1960s but divorced, according to his father, Irving, to focus on tennis, which Irving had taught him to play at the age of five. “He was one a father could be proud of,” Irving told reporters after Gary’s death. “He did not seem like the kind of guy who would do something like this.”

What kinds of guys are there? This is one of the questions posed by Ashton Politanoff’s acrid and exceptionally readable second novel, Dad Had a Bad Day, which follows a middle-aged man as he tries to recapture his glory days as an up-and-coming teenage tennis player, with results that are at first mixed and finally devastating. Feeling emasculated by unemployment—his wife, who travels often for work but whose occupation is never specified, makes just enough to keep the household afloat—and by serving as the primary caregiver to his six-year-old son, Ned Lafferty impulsively joins the local country club, using a credit card to pay for membership along with a new racket and a pharmacopoeia of protein powders and other elixirs of youth. He is drawn to the men he sees at the club, “a new species” driven by “ritual, discipline, and refinement,” with “good habits” he hopes will “rub off” on him. Soon he is captain of the club’s men’s team, jockeying for supremacy against other husbands and fathers who seem, contrary to Ned’s veneration of them, just as lonely and disaffected as he is, or else becoming sick with envy of the younger, more athletic patrons who have yet to begin the long slide into midlife crisis.

Here are sad dads and washed-up jocks, suburbanites in their thirties and forties dipping their toes into the manosphere by embracing its protocols of relentless self-optimization (also known as “maxxing”). They lift weights, chug shakes, and play tennis until they puke, then drink too many beers at the club’s restaurant. Many of them, including Ned and his childhood friend and rival, Roland, are scarred by their time as youth players, haunted by memories of the sadistic coaches and cruel, competitive fathers who terrorized them both on and off the court. Masculinity, in this novel, is an inheritance of anguish and misadventure—one battle after another in which boy is pitted against boy and then man against man, all of them vying for a phantom ideal of total immunity from the frustrations and injustices of ordinary life.

Amateur competitive tennis makes a good backdrop for all this testosterone-fueled flailing. Tennis is traditionally a rich person’s game, with a higher outlay than the great populist pastimes of soccer and basketball. It is also home to the infamously explosive temperaments of John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors and to the unapologetic sexism and racism directed at stars from Billie Jean King to the Williams sisters to Naomi Osaka. (In 2016 computer scientists at Cornell University published a study showing that journalists are exponentially more likely to ask female tennis players questions that are unrelated to the sport, such as where they like to shop or, as one inquired of Serena Williams in 2015, why they don’t smile more.) In other words, tennis is something of a whited sepulcher, its genteel façade concealing considerable rot.

“The game of tennis,” according to Politanoff’s epigraph, “was originally played by monks.” The game, in this case, was probably jeu de paume, which dates back to twelfth-century France. It involves smacking a ball with your bare hand instead of a racket and does indeed seem to have been played in monasteries. As for rackets, they were added a few centuries later. In his Troilus and Criseyde, completed sometime in the 1380s, Chaucer has Troilus upbraid his friend Pandare by comparing him to a “raket” that plays “to and fro,/Nettle in, dok out, now this, now that.” Better known is a scene from the first act of Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which a French ambassador presents King Henry with a gift of tennis balls from the Dauphin—a cheeky allusion to the erstwhile Prince Hal’s misspent youth. Henry is unamused. “When we have matched our rackets to these balls,” he warns, “we will in France, by God’s grace, play a set/Shall strike” the French king’s “crown into the hazard.”

In the mid-sixteenth century, a younger brother of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne died after a tennis ball hit him in the head. Caravaggio is said to have killed a man over a tennis match, although his biographer Andrew Graham-Dixon thinks it more likely that he killed a man in a duel on a tennis court. Variants of the sport remained enormously popular throughout the Renaissance—Anne Boleyn was watching a game at Hampton Court Palace when she was arrested—but its popularity declined in the eighteenth century, when cards and billiards replaced it as the aristocrat’s diversion of choice. It does make a cameo, however, in one of the most important events leading up to the French Revolution. On June 20, 1789, members of France’s Third Estate met on an indoor tennis court at Versailles and swore not to dissolve until they had written their country a new constitution. This is known as the Tennis Court Oath.

No one had much time for tennis in revolutionary France, but the sport thrived in England, where the first Wimbledon was held in 1877. Just four years later, the first US National Championship, now called the US Open, was held on grass courts at Newport Casino in Rhode Island. But tennis became newly trendy in the 1970s and 1980s, when televised matches made celebrities out of players like McEnroe, a brilliant tactician and hothead who earned himself the nickname SuperBrat, the power forehand pioneer Boris “Boom Boom” Becker, tough-as-nails Martina Navratilova (“the Iron Lady”), and Navratilova’s unflappable rival, Chris Evert (“the Ice Maiden”). The sport entered a new phase with the rise of Venus and Serena Williams, who, in the 1990s, brought a much-needed diversity to a mostly lily-white milieu.

In 2025 tennis was the fourth-most-popular sport in the world. For six consecutive years it added new players, its growth led by women and people under thirty-five. The game holds special appeal in a culture obsessed with finding new bulwarks against aging. The Copenhagen City Heart Study, an ongoing epidemiological research project begun in 1976, has found that recreational tennis players live on average 9.7 years longer than people who don’t regularly exercise—much better results than swimming (3.4 years), cycling (3.7 years), or jogging (3.2 years). Mark Kovacs, a coach and physiologist, told The New York Times earlier this year that the benefits are as much mental as they are cardiovascular. “Cognitively demanding and intrinsically social,” tennis forces us to react in real time to another person. Moreover, it is best played not in a cortisol-spiking frenzy but with titrated sangfroid. As W. Timothy Gallwey put it in his beloved self-help manual The Inner Game of Tennis, first published in 1974, “The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”

Alas for Ned Lafferty. When we meet him, he is thirty-nine and already in the midst of a fast-moving nervous breakdown. He’s been laid off from his job, and he and his wife have struck a bargain that will be familiar to many a single-income household: since he’s not working, “Daddy daycare it is.” In the novel’s first pages, Ned is stuck at home with his son, Freddie, who is out sick from school. For no apparent reason, he walks into the garage and digs out his old racket, swinging it back and forth. The next thing we know, he is touring the Wind and Sea Tennis Club and enrolling Freddie in the club’s on-site childcare. Bribing him with toys from Target, Ned extracts from Freddie a promise not to tell his mother, a secret that will become increasingly difficult to keep after Ned—a former champion who’s “tasted glory” on the court—gets himself hired as the captain of the men’s summer tennis team and begins spending every waking hour at the Wind and Sea. Sometimes he sneaks off while his son is asleep. In one harrowing scene, he leaves Freddie at a stranger’s birthday party in a public park so he can go practice with his team.

Narrating the book in a hollowed-out, vaguely menacing first person, Ned shuttles between the present, in which he may be losing his mind, and the past, where the seeds of his current dysfunction are sown. “Every week they ask you,” he says of his life as an eleven-year-old player, “What’s your rank? How’d you do? What round did you get to?” But they never ask, “Did you have fun?” His alcoholic stepfather wouldn’t speak to him “for days” if he lost a match, even as “he would tell everyone he knew, including members of the club, my coaches, that I had won the whole tournament.” In college his coach makes him throw tennis balls across the court until he injures himself badly. Ned’s response to this setback brings about the end of his tennis career, until he resurfaces at the Wind and Sea.

Politanoff himself was once a Division I tennis player, and his terse, ominous prose is stippled with technical terms and sports slang, whizzing by like so many Dunlop ATPs. Players will hit “a slice, a drive, a heavy ball, a drop shot” or “a nice ice-cream floater.” His unnumbered chapters are short, but a lot happens in each one—not unlike, you might say, a tennis match, where the governing tension between a compact field of play and balls that can reach speeds of more than 150 miles per hour creates an environment at once tightly contained and incredibly volatile. In the space of a few paragraphs, Ned will abandon and recover his child, bungle an extramarital affair, win and lose, experience ecstasy and dejection. He is high on his own poor choices, which, for all their stupidity, seem to bring a much-needed urgency to his disappointed life.

Several reviews of Dad Had a Bad Day have focused on the story’s relationship to toxic masculinity. The term, which has become ubiquitous, is often attributed to the psychologist Shepherd Bliss, though its exact provenance is unclear. In 2019 Bliss defined it simply as behavior by men “that diminishes women, children, [and] other men.” Today the phrase describes everything from the crimes of Andrew and Tristan Tate—social media stars who promote misogyny along with intermittent fasting and who were arrested in July 2026 on charges of rape and sex trafficking—to the stern injunction to kids that boys don’t cry. Last year the British television series Adolescence was widely lauded for its exploration of the phenomenon among schoolchildren, and in particular of the Internet-based subcultures that promote hateful attitudes toward women while encouraging boys to cultivate a persona that combines the irrepressible id of a caveman, the grandiosity of a mob boss, and the jet-setting avarice of Jordan Belfort, the fraudulent stockbroker immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street.^*

In a recent interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Politanoff acknowledged that Ned’s attempts to make himself fitter, hotter, more attractive to women and more intimidating to men are “totally playing off” toxic masculinists like “Ben Greenfield, Joe Rogan, Paul Chek, and all these names that became relevant during the Covid-19 lockdown for their self-improvement hacks, life hacks, biohacks.” “I hired a personal trainer named Mason,” Ned reports. “We focused on the main muscle groups—back, chest, shoulders, biceps, triceps, quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves.” He also hires “a tennis coach named Joachim,” whom he describes as “a Norwegian-Swede mix,” and a masseuse named Vasanta. Meanwhile,

I made smoothies at home with power greens, pitted dates, blueberries, almond milk, vanilla-flavored plant-based protein powder, and cacao nibs. I purchased some polos, some grommets, some string savers, head and lead tape, athletic boxer briefs, jock-itch cream, moisture-control sports socks, antifungal foot spray, callus and corn shaver, some tea-tree foot scrub. I purchased books with titles such as Champion Mindset and Mental Toughness in Tennis. I applied zinc oxide to the bridge of my nose. I stood in front of the mirror and repeated positive affirmations. I kept a journal. I charged everything to the secret credit card I kept behind my driver’s license in my Montblanc wallet.

Here is the vocabulary, and the shopping list, of the manosphere, right down to that crypto-eugenicist detail about the ethnicity of Ned’s coach. That detail chimes with an earlier moment in the novel, when Ned ruefully compares his own “swarthy” features with his wife’s and son’s blond hair, light eyes, and fair skin. There is, as Politanoff says, “a lot of humor” to be found here but also a lot of menace. Like Greenfield et al., Ned aspires to be an Übermensch: a superior human specimen whose body has been engineered for excellence, supercharged by nut milks and purged of undesirable elements, from foot fungus to negative thoughts. It is an identity in conflict with his role as a twenty-first-century parent, which requires him to be a gentle, endlessly patient caretaker who apologizes when he yells and stays in the bathroom with Freddie while the boy shits—a “mother bird,” as Ned puts it, instead of an alpha male.

There is no question that disagreeable, even dangerous attitudes toward masculinity play a significant part in Politanoff’s novel, which is propelled by Ned’s realization that he can no longer bear being a stay-at-home dad in a sexless marriage. But in its preoccupation with what Politanoff calls the “abject-adjacent features” of manospheric culture, Dad Had a Bad Day also has something in common with Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) and Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin (2024), books that similarly test the boundary between self-care and self-destruction. In The Coin, a young woman with a taste for Birkin bags and luxury skin care shaves and scrubs every plane of her body until her bathtub is filled with hair, dead skin, and fingernail clippings. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, another young woman uses psychiatric drugs to force herself into a part-time coma. She calls it “hibernating” and spends her days and nights either asleep or watching movies. “I stopped tweezing,” she says, “stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving.”

While these earlier novels are obviously interested in the drama of feminine upkeep, with its strange commixture of decadence and asceticism, it would be wrong to reduce them to meditations on gender. Zaher’s heroine, like the novelist herself, is Palestinian, and The Coin proposes an oblique but unmistakable link between her obsession with cleanliness and the killing fields of her homeland. Looking down at that bathtub, she sees “thin long hairs like supple grass, clusters of pubic hair like spindly bushes,” the “primordial matter” of slimy soap “pooling around the dead bodies” of her skin and nails, “cuticles in rows like limestone terraces.” “It was beautiful,” she concludes, “like summer in Palestine.” Agonizingly unsentimental, My Year of Rest and Relaxation—which is, for the most part, set in a pre–September 11 New York City full of vacuous party people, frat-boy bankers, and art-world vultures—is emptied of anything that might make existence seem worthwhile. And yet Moshfegh’s protagonist seems to believe that death is more than life deserves. She opts for inertia over suicide, allowing her body’s slow deterioration to stand as an indictment of a world she never fully leaves behind.

Similarly, Ned’s manic ablutions have a despairing quality that suggests masochism as much as a desire to excel. He drinks beer in an ice bath that feels “like a thousand tiny needles stabbing” him at once. He makes himself two batches of Sumatran coffee—first in a French press and then with a Chemex, “using a brown filter, unbleached”—and then continues his morning routine:

I toasted the heel piece of cracked sourdough and ate it without butter. I had to go to the bathroom frequently. I did some pushups on the hardwood to ground myself…. I put on some sunscreen. I watched the highlights from Halle, a warm-up grass-court tournament before Wimbledon. I ate a protein bar. I made myself a smoothie with dried mango, arugula, peanut butter, ice, and 2%. I poured it into the sink after one sip. I messaged my squad: Match still on for noon, courts should be dry. I tied the end of a red band around the sliding door handle like a tourniquet and proceeded to tug it in various ways as part of my rotator cuff exercise regimen.

There is little pleasure to be found here. Ned’s meals, such as they are, are tasteless and punishing, sending him running to the toilet between rounds of push-ups. As for exercise, it suggests only injury, that tourniquet calling up images of soldiers bleeding out on a battlefield. The whole passage swells with small but telling signifiers of bourgeois comfort—the pricey food items, the hardwood floors, the studied attention to one’s own body (putting on sunscreen, having a “regimen”)—that feel strangely uncomfortable, as if Ned were in a torture chamber rather than a nice suburban home. Part of our unease comes from knowing that he is living beyond his means, and that his bubble is surely going to burst. But we are also repelled because Ned’s environment is itself repulsive, empty of beauty or meaning and representing nothing except the money that furnishes it.

For all that it satirizes male delusion and middle-class ennui, Dad Had a Bad Day stops short of political critique, which allows it to maintain its light touch. There are moments, however, when it seems to point toward a better life than the one Ned feverishly pursues, riven as it is by competition over women, resources, and self-respect. Some of these moments involve Ned’s imperfect yet still undeniably loving rapport with his son. Others foreground his tenderness toward other men. Ned calls this tenderness “a kinship,” but occasionally it seems like erotic interest. After he showers next to a young man at the club, he takes some time to look at his body:

He was backlit by a small window and naked, with one leg up on the marble counter, his balls and penis dangling. He was using a boar bristled hairbrush on his leg, starting from up high, on the inside. His leg hair was curled and finally groomed—it looked like bronze fleece.

Another time, Ned watches a man “with no pubic hair” rub lotion into his belly “like he was massaging dough.” When he plays with his old friend Roland, he notices that Roland hits “a hard, penetrating ball concealed by relaxed strokes and minimal movement”—a description that might be applied, under different circumstances, to a good lover.

These sensual glimmers are no match for the antagonistic sociality of straight male relationships, which, in this novel, quickly convert sympathy or desire into rivalry and aggression. Inevitably, the camaraderie between Ned and his teammates will sour, sometimes turning violent; just as inevitably, his secret hobby will be discovered, his marriage imperiled, his delusions exposed. All the same, his carnal curiosity about other men feels far more urgent than his frustrated longing for his wife, who brushes off his advances and masturbates in the shower, or the female club member with whom he almost has an affair. Other than Ned’s love for his son, it is the only thing in his world that isn’t ugly—or expensive. Perhaps in another lifetime, or another novel, Ned would find a way to nourish these intimations of benevolence or even love, refusing to let them be spoiled by his own aspirational machismo. Unfortunately, he is not that kind of guy.