This is a basketball novel, the way that Moby Dick is a book about whales. It's late in the Seventies. Principal narrator Rashid Stokes, the "first black, professional-basketball-destined, top drawer student-athlete, California Key Scholar up from not-quite ghetto dog," narrates the story of Mystic Williams, his New York Knick teammate. Mystic, actually Richard, arrived in the NBA and let his play do the talking for him, a pose reminiscent of the...