Critics of baseball and literary fiction level some of the same complaints: too slow, pretentious, filled with esoteric nuance, lacking excitement.
They’re not wrong. As the old baseball manager Leo Durocher put it, “Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.”
The same applies to literary fiction. Baseball is called the thinking man’s game because enough space is left to ponder other things, and the stuffiest prose is comprised exclusively of pondering. On and on the parallels roll. It’s a wonder that someone has not underscored this before Chad Harbach, in his beautifully constructed novel The Art of Fielding.
Book Riot called Harbach’s book “a baseball fan’s baseball novel,” but it is about much more … in the way that Moby Dick is about more than a whale.
We meet the principal character, Henry Skirmishander, as a baseball prodigy. The story jumps freely between at least four different perspectives, but Henry is principal in the sense that all of the other characters may be classified by their relationship with him—Henry’s mentor, Henry’s roommate, Henry’s college president, etc.
The Art of Fielding recounts the rare season in which Henry’s college team, the humble Westish Harpooners, dared aspire for a conference title. The story begins long before the season’s first pitch and its legend lingers long after, but Harbach structures his novel around the team and the season, making success or failure the central conflict. Simultaneously, each character also aspires to individual success, spinning several subplots, each rich enough to vie for centrality:
• Henry hopes to break an important record, consecutive games without an error, held by his idol, the great Aparicio Rodriguez.
• Mike Schwartz, Henry’s mentor and teammate, waits by the mailbox for his law school acceptance letter. (He’s ruined his body playing sports he will never master.)
• Westish College President Guert Affenlight hides a forbidden love across several cultural lines including age, race and orientation.
• Affenlight’s daughter, Pella, a portrait of wasted potential, returns to Westish with hope for a fresh start.
Chad Harbach received a lucrative advance for this first novel, achieving a form of success for which many writers pine, and he drew early comparisons to John Irving. But this book makes it clear that Harbach, like his characters, longs for much more. In fact, a statue of Herman Melville towers over the campus of Westish, serving as a nod to the first great American novel and simultaneously reminding us of Harbach’s ambition.
The author brings something of a Buddhist point of view to his baseball book—his story gives the sense that desire poisons life. His characters all do fine until they start to care about something—anything—with fervency. The precise moment when they care substantially enough to be noted in the text, the object of desire turns to dust … and pain ensues.
Examples? The simple-minded Henry seems perfectly content playing baseball as a child’s game … until an agent alerts him to his draft day potential. He then suffers the fate of Chuck Knoblauch and becomes inexplicably unable to throw the ball accurately.
Schwartz has his glory days on the field of sports, but in the twilight of his college career his desires move off the field. He fears himself inept there.
Afenlight seems to have risen casually, almost accidently, through the ranks of academia to his post as Westish College President. His love affair with Henry’s roommate appears to be the only time he’s ever experienced longing in his entire life. It can only end badly.
On and on it rolls.
While he may not have written the grail of American literary fiction, Harbach has tapped into a defining trait of the Millennial Generation in much the same way Fight Club did for Generation X.
Millennials resent the cost of success. We know it takes a lifetime to attain, so we take up frivolous pursuits to entertain us in the interim, planning to put away childish things once we have “made it.” When our dream finally materializes, it demands from us everything we have come to love in the meantime.
As the first Millennials achieve the American Dream, we find we don’t really want what our parents told us we should want. Henry demonstrates this perfectly. He wants to play professional baseball. He wants to make millions. He wants to accumulate all the trappings of success … but he is not sure he wants to give up the home he’s made at Westish to have all that.
But, tragically unspoken, Westish comes with an expiration date. The home Henry loves cannot last beyond his four-year visit. Much as Gatsby longed to recover a golden age, Henry Skirmishander wants to hold onto his. The tighter he grips, the more it slips between his fingers. Henry’s choice is really not between Westish and professional baseball … but between two futures which he fears equally.
Isn’t that a choice we all face every day?
Ray Deck III is an actor and writer residing digitally at RayDeck3.com When he is not assembling sequences of words, you can find him gallivanting around the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York.