Title: The Art of Fielding
Author: Chad Harbach
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780007374465
Price: R180.95
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Some books just can’t win. If a book isn’t praised to the rafters, nobody knows about it. If it is announced in big headlines as the next Great American Novel, it cannot ever live up to such a reputation. Chad Harbach’s The art of fielding is unfortunately one of those novels. It is not only an American bestseller, but the book about its genesis, written by Keith Gessen, is also a bestseller, albeit on a smaller Vanity Fair scale.
This is a novel about baseball. It is very technical at times, but you can ignore the detail and get the gist of who is winning, so sport is not a barrier for the non-American reader.
Henry Skrimshander is the best catcher Mike Schwartz had ever seen. Mike arranges for him to go to a small college and then helps him to become such a good player that talent scouts line up to watch him. Then Henry’s ball hits the wrong target (the face of his roommate) and Henry loses his magic touch. Will he ever regain his confidence? Will he join the Big League (with the big money) or go back to his small Dakota town, being nothing? Will the novel end like a Hollywood movie with applause for the plucky hero or like a big novel with a soft sigh of acceptance and forbearance in the face of the tragic fate of being average that awaits all?
I found Henry a strangely one-dimensional character. He is interested only in baseball and all his emotional energy is dedicated to that. Not even losing his virginity with his best friend’s girlfriend is more important than throwing a ball exactly into a waiting glove. His friend and mentor, Mike Schwartz, is more interesting. Like Salieri in Amadeus he suffers because he knows he will never be great. Unlike Salieri, he helps his friend to be an even better baseball player. He even starts living vicariously through the achievements and eventual disappointments of Henry. Although Mike knows he is not brilliant, he applies only for the best Ivy League universities, and when he is turned down he despairs. He fights his destiny throughout the novel, yet in the last chapter he accepts that he will be a coach of other great people and the reader is not given any reason why he does that since the focalisation shifts away from him. Mike falls in love with Pella, the daughter of the college president. She is starting life again as a student and a dishwasher after a disastrous youthful marriage. Her father is more interesting. He falls in love with a brilliant young student. What is strange about that? one may ask. As the book says, “Sleeping with an alluring female student was the second great topic of American literature, after plain-old infidelity.”
This student is male and Affenlight, the college president, had always been heterosexual. He is quite worried about his sexual techniques. This romance is sweet and is marred only by the oh so polite homophobia of the trustees of the college.
All in all, an interesting plot. Baseball makes a good allegory for life. Even if you do not like the ending, you can still sympathise with the agony of not being at your best any more. You can even admire the hard work that all the characters put in to realise their ambitions and dreams. There are some lovely little literary details about Melville and Emerson. Emerson apparently dug up the grave of his young wife to make sure she is really dead. But a great novel is more than plot and sympathy. Language is also important. Unfortunately, I laughed out loud a few times when the author tried out metaphors. I can still accept that a popular sportsman would move around campus in a “sharklike way … devouring girls’ smiles”, but the following belongs on a Halloween card: “The pumpkin sun had impaled itself on the spire of Westish Chapel and begun to bleed.”
Alas, Chad Harbach is no Philip Roth. Roth has the style, the intellect and the great themes necessary for the great novel all balanced. Nor is he a Jeffrey Eugenides or a Jonathan Franzen who combines good solid writing with great characterisation. If you are looking for the next great American novelist, maybe Jennifer Egan is a safer bet.