Double Fault
by Lionel Shriver
Serpent’s Tail Press ₤10.99, 354 pages

Anyone who was held mesmerised by the voice of the gut-wrenchingly clear-headed narrator, Eva Khatchadourian, in Lionel Shriver’s Orange Prize winning novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, will recognise Willy Novinsky.

Willy is the tennis-obsessed heroine of Shriver’s Double Fault, a novel first published in the US in 1997 and now in paperback original in the UK. From the age of four she has had only one dream - to reach the top 10 in the international rankings and play in the grand slam tournaments. A disciplined, determined loner, she has sacrificed all of the ordinary pleasures of life to her tennis ambitions.

When Willy meets and falls for Eric Oberdorf on the public tennis courts across the road from her New York apartment building, it seems a match made in heaven - and Shriver’s pun is intentional. He is a talented sportsman who has only happened on tennis in his late teens, but now shows real flair at the game. He is head over heels in love with Willy. He will encourage her to the top of her game, keeping a decorous distance behind her in the rankings.

But this is not what happens. As Eric’s game thrives and develops, Willy’s falters. The relationship seems to sharpen his competitiveness and add an edge of ruthlessness to his own desire to succeed. Willy, by contrast, finds herself hypnotised by Eric’s success. The independence of spirit which according to her coach has been one of her main assets succumbs to the temptation constantly to compare herself with the rising star, her husband. When injury stops her dead in her competitive tracks, she spirals into decline.

As Shriver brilliantly and deftly conveys, most of this ferocious struggle between would-be partners is going on in Willy’s head. She has never been good at social relations and is a lousy communicator - especially with her close family. With no possible outlet for her escalating fears and frustrations, her sense of thwarted achievement mutates gradually into hatred of Eric. It drives her first to sabotage and then to violence. Shriver has a terrible gift for laying bare for us the emotions that lie just beneath the skin, the nerve-endings that distribute intense, unbearable pain underneath a deceptively smooth exterior.

By the end of the novel we are fairly sure that Eric - though far too insensitive to respond to Willy’s emotional needs - is not the self-absorbed, obnoxious, unfeeling bully she has made him. Nor, more disturbingly still, is she the deranged, demonic, self-destructive force she believes herself to be. As the elaborate - and occasionally laboured - tennis metaphors and analogies make clear, Shriver’s world is not that of the emotional real. Yet her protagonists steer their lives towards the logical outcomes of scenarios worthy of a Hitchcock movie.

Shriver is a truly remarkable star in the literary firmament. She has an uncanny sense of the way women subject themselves to secret, inward torture, weighing themselves down with passionate feelings they believe socially unacceptable to bring out into the open. She understands how such feelings are turned in on the soul, scouring and scarring the already fractured female inner self. I doubt there is any thoughtful woman who does not recognise herself somewhere in Shriver’s writing.

In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Eva Khatchadourian’s inexpressible feelings of dislike for her son were eventually matched by his massacre of seven of his fellow high-school students. The enormity of his actions finally provide Eva with a kind of solace, and offer a sort of resolution. Double Fault is a less fully achieved piece of work, and ultimately, I think, its plot is not quite robust enough for the weight of all that exquisitely realised buried feeling. Nonetheless, there is something terribly satisfying about the absence of any explanatory awfulness at its end. We are left with nothing to take hold of that can explain how two people so brimming with promise could turn out to be so mutually destructive. Or rather, we are left only with the realisation that if one party to a relationship is as driven by self-loathing as Willy Novinsky is, then no partner on earth can save her.

Lisa Jardine is Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and director of the AHRC Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London.