Big
League Anxiety on the Baseball Diamond
By
GREGORY COWLES
THE ART OF
FIELDING
By Chad Harbach
512 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.
To defenders of baseball and literary fiction, the charges against each
are familiar, and overlapping: too slow, too precious, not enough action. The
only realistic response is a resigned shrug. Guilty, and so what? You may as
well complain that lemons are too yellow. The indictment amounts to a kind of
category error; detractors went looking for entertainment, and found art
instead.
Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow,
precious and altogether excellent first novel, “The Art of Fielding.” “You
loved it,” he writes of the game, “because you considered it an art: an
apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude,
which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to
communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human
Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can
even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”
If it seems a stretch for a baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and
the entire human condition in its mitt, well, “The Art of Fielding” isn’t
really a baseball novel at all, or not only. It’s also a campus novel and a
bromance (and for that matter a full-fledged gay romance), a comedy of manners
and a tragicomedy of errors — the baseball kind as well as the other kind,
which as Alexander Pope pointed out also has something to do with the human
condition.
But it starts and ends with baseball. The novel centers on the Westish
College Harpooners, a Division III team from the Wisconsin side of Lake
Michigan that sees its fortunes rise and then rise some more with the arrival
of a nearly magical young shortstop named Henry Skrimshander. Henry is an
infield savant, scrawny but supremely gifted, and by his junior year he’s
chasing records and being scouted by the majors as a top draft prospect. Then,
in the baseball equivalent of a werewolf movie, it all goes terribly wrong:
Henry changes, before his teammate’s horrified eyes, into Chuck Knoblauch. In
other words (for those who don’t remember Knoblauch’s struggles with the
turn-of-the-millennium Yankees), he enters a prolonged and agonizing funk in
which, for no good reason, he finds it impossible to field his position.
“Only two balls were hit to Henry,” Harbach writes in one of many crisp
passages about what it’s like to play the game. “Both times he double-clutched
and made a soft, hesitant throw. Instead of rifle shots fired at a target, they
felt like doves released from a box.” If it’s painful to watch Henry fall
apart, it’s excruciating to track his dissolution thought by anguished
microthought: “The distance called for a casual sidearm fling — he’d done it
ten thousand times. But now he paused, double-clutched. He’d thrown the last
one too soft, better put a little mustard on it — no, no, not too hard,
too hard would be bad too. He clutched again. Now the runner was closing in,
and Henry had no choice but to throw it hard, really hard, too hard for Ajay to
handle from 30 feet away.” This is the paradox of sports novels, which like all
novels thrive by leaving their heroes vulnerable and exposed: the worse the
play, the better the fiction.
As befits a shortstop, Henry is the linchpin around which the book’s
other major characters revolve. These include a couple of his teammates, the
lumbering catcher and captain Mike Schwartz, who is moved to recite Robert
Lowell when he first sees Henry play, and the skilled hitter (and fervent
environmentalist) Owen Dunne, who introduces himself to Henry with the
statistically improbable phrase “I’ll be your gay mulatto roommate.” They also
include a couple of people who might quaintly be called team boosters: the
college president, Guert Affenlight, and his prodigal daughter, Pella, who has
fled her marriage and is enduring a crisis of confidence that echoes Henry’s
own. Over the capacious expanse of the novel’s 500 pages, these characters come
together and move apart in ways that a resident adviser might not recommend but
that remind us our lives are shaped at least as much by our mistakes as by our
ideals.
Measured against other big, ambitious debuts by striving young writers
(Harbach is a founder and editor of the literary magazine n+1), “The Art of
Fielding” is surprisingly old-fashioned and almost freakishly well behaved.
There’s some strained humor in the early going, when Harbach seems unsure of
his register, but once he settles into a mildly satiric mode of psychological
realism — the mode of latter-day Jonathan Franzen, rather
than the high turbulence of David Foster Wallace —
the book assumes an attractive, and fitting, 19th-century stateliness.
President Affenlight is a Melville scholar, and thanks to a discovery he made
during his undergraduate days at Westish, the school has adopted Melville as
its presiding spirit: hence the Harpooner mascot, and hence the brooding
Melville statue that looks out over the lake. (In this light, Henry’s surname
seems a remnant of the jokier book Harbach may have intended, but oh well:
silly names are so much a feature of serious fiction these days that it’s hard
to object, and in any case he’s mostly called “Skrimmer” or “Skrim.”)
In fact, the novel is so rife with literary allusions that you have to
wonder whether Harbach, who studied English at Harvard, cares more about
baseball or books: a sport, or a pastime? Besides Lowell and Melville, there
are explicit or implicit references to Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman, to
“Death in Venice” and "A Prayer for Owen Meany"; even
the title, “The Art of Fielding,” can be read as a winking reference to that
other Henry, who knew something about satiric novels. So it feels exactly right
that Henry’s crisis is precipitated by overanalysis — he’s paralyzed by
thought, by an inability to simply act (or react). This is credible from a
sports point of view, and fraught with significance from a literary one.
Thinking, after all, is a writer’s primary weapon, but every writer knows it’s
double-edged; live too much in your head and you don’t live enough in the
world. This is Hamlet’s quandary, and, as one character unsurprisingly notes,
also Prufrock’s: “Do I dare, and do I dare?” Harbach’s achievement is to
transfer the thinking man’s paralysis to the field of play, where every hesitation
is amplified and every error judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience. “We
all have our doubts and fragilities,” Affenlight thinks, “but poor Henry had to
face his in public at appointed times, with half the crowd anxiously counting
on him and the other half cheering for him to fail.”
Last year, in an essay in n+1 contrasting the writing culture of M.F.A.
programs with that of the New York-based publishing industry, Harbach argued
that commercial pressures push nonacademic writers to be “readable” and
“middlebrow.” These aren’t necessarily insults — the middlebrow is where art
and entertainment get together over canapés and cold beers, and Harbach knows
it: in the same essay, he first cited Franzen’s "Freedom" as
an archetype of the New York middlebrow, then praised it as “the best American
novel of the young millennium.” It’s worth observing that when Harbach wrote
those words, he had already received a significant advance for the very
Franzen-like “Art of Fielding.” So his reflections on market pressure and the
“deep authorial desire to communicate to the uninterested” have, in retrospect,
the frisson of a writer anxious he was selling out. He needn’t worry. Failure
and success and outsize ambition — “to want to be perfect,” as Henry puts it;
“to want everything to be perfect” — these are fitting themes for a
crowd-pleasing baseball story, yes, but they are also the natural concerns of a
serious artist coming to terms with his powerful talent and intentions. Welcome
to the big leagues, kid. Now get out there and play.
Gregory
Cowles is an editor at the Book Review.
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