Passing Again

Passing Again is double-dealing—a memoir masquerading as a novel or a novel pretending to be a memoir of the doubles Tom LeClair and Michael Keever, former pro basketball player and the putative author of LeClair’s four earlier “Passing” novels. Real author and invented character go on a buddy road trip to Athens, Greece, where both their lives changed decades ago, to recover the past. And to arrange futures of revenge and sex they have concealed from each other. But their ulterior purposes are side-tracked in Athens when they discover that a real group influenced by an ecoterrorist made up in Passing Off plots to bring down the Parthenon. Once a hero in Greece, Keever is convinced by the philhellene LeClair to again employ deception to save the monument. Passing Again is appropriately and militantly hybrid, a splicing of old facts and new illusions, a revenge comedy and love story, Greek travelogue and Socratic dialogue, an archive of autobiographical texts and fifty photos, a literary entertainment and green vision. Although Passing Again is a stand-alone work, in it fiction does double other fiction, life imitates fiction, and life even duplicates life as this final “Passing” novel proves once again the value of Keever’s long-held motto and LeClair’s constant practice: “No game, no gain.”