Chad Harbach himself is playing for myth and Americana -- how does a young man field what life throws at him? All of his characters are types, and a lot of their shenanigans fit the author's purposes more snugly than a fielder's glove.
The Art of Fielding, Little, Brown & Co., 512 pp., $25.99 As fat and puissant as a wad of chewing tobacco, "The Art of Fielding" is likely to split the crowd into lovers and haters.
It tells the contemporary story of five protagonists tucked into the fictional "Westish College, that little school in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin." First-time novelist Chad Harbach has sold television serial rights to HBO. And last year, Bloomberg News reported, "Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000."
So responses to "The Art of Fielding" will be complicated, refracted by envy, burnished by a fresh piece in Vanity Fair called "How a Book Is Born: The Making of 'The Art of Fielding.' " Harbach buddy Keith Gessen describes the coup and is peddling his magazine story as an e-book.
Publishing and its profits aside, "The Art of Fielding" rolls out at a pleasant clip, its sentences polished and free of irony, its finale satisfying and sentimental.
It begins with "the kid," naturally, a shortstop whose throws "smacked the pocket of the first baseman's glove with the sound of a gun going off." And when he fields, it's "as if time slowed down for him alone."
Cue the John Williams orchestration.
The kid, we learn, is Henry Skrimshander from South Dakota, who weighs "a buck and a quarter, maximum" when the hulking Westish catcher, Mike Schwartz, spots him. Henry becomes Mike's project, their bond intense.
Harbach is excellent at evoking the rituals of the locker room, the practice field, and, yes, the game. Here is Mike: "The cartilage in his knees was torn to shreds, the result of too many hours behind home plate, too many sets of squats with too much weight, the bar bowed over his back like a comma."
Enter teammate Owen Dunne, who introduces himself to Henry with "I'll be your gay mulatto roommate," and later, Pella Affenlight, the rebellious, brilliant college president's daughter. She is, of course, fatally alluring in her plum-colored hair. Both Owen and Pella add sexual heat to the sports buffet, which is rounded out by the ex-jock president himself, Guert Affenlight.
Westish's chief administrator made his reputation at Harvard, with a celebrated academic book about American 19th-century writers, "The Sperm-Squeezers." Clearly, Harbach has pitched his tent in John Irving territory -- the picaresque names, the unlikely sex and, most emphatically, the moment when Henry's error-free throw veers wildly awry.
It marks the spot when the snake slitters into the garden.
"The Art of Fielding" brims with sportswriting tropes. It flashes along in 82 cinematic chapters. The longest and unlikeliest is No. 75, when the Westish Harpooners -- an Affenlight nod to Melville -- must play for the Division III championship.
Harbach himself is playing for myth and Americana -- how does a young man field what life throws at him? All of his characters are types, and a lot of their shenanigans fit the author's purposes more snugly than a fielder's glove.
And yet, I read with relish; I rooted for the Harpooners; and I sighed happily at the end. This is a novel of men closing their eyes and summoning their strength. And sometimes, that's entertainment enough.
Karen R. Long is book editor of The Plain Dealer.
Source: http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2011/10/chad_harbachs_the_art_of_field.html
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