Pockets of self-discovery

WHEN I lived in Seoul, I spent an afternoon in a smoke-filled bar in a high-rise building, drinking beer and watching two strangers shoot pool. Miserably isolated by my inability to communicate verbally in my new home, I found these hours blissful. Each of the male players silently acknowledged me with a nod; they circled the table carefully, sinking stripes and solids in turn. They looked sleek and lucky and undeniably cool. The combination of their powerful but relaxed movements and the sound of pool sticks breaking racks at other tables soothed me. That pool hall, an odd place of solace in the center of an enormous city, seemed to float above the traffic snarls and verbal tangles of the people on the streets below. I sensed a connection between the players that superseded language, and the longer I watched, the more convinced I became that the game was more than a hobby; it was a way of moving and thinking, a way of engaging with the world.

In her memoir "Sweet: An Eight-Ball Odyssey," Heather Byer conveys this sense that pool, with its raw competition and camaraderie, acts as a salve for an often bleak urban existence. Byer is a thoroughly modern heroine with an obsession. The odyssey begins in New York City, where she is a mildly ambitious movie executive who pushes arugula around at swanky industry lunches and is asked to find "the next John Grisham"; meanwhile, none of her projects makes it to the big screen.

Feeling harried and hollow, she searches the urban landscape for a meaningful activity that will deliver a mix of acceptance and invisibility. She finds her answer in a "cheap, too-bright pub on the East Side" and in smoky billiard halls with names like the Ace. Almost overnight Byer enters a world where she is judged not by her appearance, earning power or marital status but by an ability to choose and execute a combination of strategically placed shots. Here community takes on the contours of a dysfunctional family in which everybody's bad habits are not only known and openly discussed but also often the subject of tasteless jokes.

In dark rooms beneath the city's facade, Byer begins to jigsaw together a new identity that casts off the pressures of pedigree and success. She seeks to learn a game that is "physical, graceful, animal, atavistic, sexual" -- a game in which success has as much to do with luck as it does with skill. With the help of mentors who include brilliant deadbeats, struggling alcoholics and women exuding an unconventional glamour, Byer thrives in this underbelly world, which surprises her. Her society-sanctioned assets mean nothing here.