Twist of
Fate Derails Path of Athlete
By MICHIKO
KAKUTANI
THE ART OF FIELDING
By Chad
Harbach
512 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $25.99.
Chad Harbach’s book “The Art of Fielding”
is not only a wonderful baseball novel — it zooms immediately into the pantheon
of classics, alongside “The Natural” by Bernard Malamud and “The Southpaw” by
Mark Harris — but it’s also a magical, melancholy story about friendship and
coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer.
Mr. Harbach, a co-founder and co-editor of
the literary journal n + 1, has the rare abilities to write with earnest,
deeply felt emotion without ever veering into sentimentality, and to create
quirky, vulnerable and fully imagined characters who instantly take up
residence in our own hearts and minds. He also manages to rework the well-worn,
much-allegorized subject of baseball and make us see it afresh, taking tired tropes
about the game (as a metaphor for life’s dreams, disappointments and hopes of
redemption) and injecting them with new energy. In doing so he has written a
novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting.
In its opening chapters “The Art of Fielding”
— set at Westish College, a small school on Lake Michigan — feels like one of
those folk-art paintings in which all the people look like brightly drawn
figures in a bucolic landscape. The central characters are Henry Skrimshander,
a shy, small-town kid who becomes the star on the school’s struggling baseball
team, the Harpooners; his roommate and fellow teammate, Owen Dunne, a
preternaturally self-possessed young man; Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners’
catcher and the heart and soul of the team, who takes it upon himself to help
Henry realize his talents; the college’s president, Guert Affenlight, a
Melville scholar who in late middle age falls improbably in love; and Guert’s
estranged daughter, Pella, who returns home to Westish College after her early,
impulsive marriage unravels.
The fates of these five people, who grow
in complexity and chiaroscuro with every page, become inextricably intertwined,
after one seemingly random event sets off a cascade of unnerving developments.
Just as Henry is set to tie an N.C.A.A. record for consecutive errorless games
by a shortstop, he makes a throw that somehow goes astray, and strikes his
roommate, Owen, smack, in the head.
Owen winds up in the hospital. Henry (not
unlike the Yankees player Chuck Knoblauch in a famous episode) suddenly finds
himself unable to throw with any accuracy, his instinctive mastery of fielding
undermined by doubts and second-guessing. Mike realizes he has invested all his
time and energy in Henry and the team, while neglecting his own plans to go to
law school. Guert develops a full-blown crush on Owen that threatens to
undermine his tenure as president. And Pella, despite her avowals to avoid
another complicated romantic entanglement, falls for the woebegone Mike, who’s
despairing over his future.
Using these events as a narrative
armature, Mr. Harbach skillfully constructs a story with startling depth of
field. Although his novel is strewn with literary allusions — from “The
Natural” to Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” to
John Irving’s “Prayer for Owen Meany” (which also pivots around the
consequences of an errant baseball) — it wears its literary borrowings lightly,
focusing instead on the inner lives of its characters.
What makes “The Art of Fielding” so affecting
is that it captures these people at that tipping point in their lives when
their dreams, seemingly within reach, suddenly lurch out of their grasp
(perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever), reminding them of their limitations and
the random workings of fate. In Henry’s case we see how talent is, at once, a
gift — offering the possibility of achievement, even grace — and a curse,
forcing him to constantly try to live up to others’ expectations and to measure
himself against his own standard of perfection. In Mike’s case we see how the
love of talent can promote a sense of inadequacy — or nurture the ability to
help others, as a coach, to realize their full potential.
Mr. Harbach understands the discipline
athletes subject themselves to, and the promise that training offers — that
“every day was like the day before but a little better”: “You ran the stadium a
little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little
harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a
little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything
grew simpler, little by little.” Over time, “whatever you didn’t need slowly
fell away,” he writes. “Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved
little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way.
Forever.” Except, of course, that it doesn’t, because perfection in sports,
like life, is subject to the vagaries of chance and the booby traps of the
human mind.
Mr. Harbach also understands the Zen of baseball.
As Henry’s hero, the famed shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez — inspired, partly it
would seem, by the real-life shortstop Luis Aparicio — writes in a book that
gives this novel its title “The Art of Fielding”: “To field a groundball must
be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against
the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is
antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path,
thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of
all suffering and poor defense.”
This may sound awfully cerebral —
especially for advice supposedly dispensed by one ballplayer to others — but
Mr. Harbach manages in these pages to make the philosophical aspects of
baseball thoroughly palpable and real. He makes us feel what baseball means to
his characters on the most visceral level, while at the same time conveying a
highly immediate sense of the game’s drama to even the most sports-agnostic of
readers.
You don’t need to be a baseball fan to
fall under this novel’s spell, but “The Art of Fielding” possesses all the
pleasures that an aficionado cherishes in a great, classic game: odd and
strangely satisfying symmetries, unforeseen swerves of fortune, and intimations
of the delicate balance between individual will and destiny that play out on
the field.
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