The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The best book I read this year. A first novel, which thankfully tries nothing fancy. Simply a straightforward story unadorned with stylistic trimmings or experiments in narrative form. Nowadays, it seems a novel will not be recognized unless it plays with structure, or drop kicks its time line into a meat grinder, or even ignores charaactrer and motivation for vast stretches.
But in the end, story wins out. A good plot, and honest characters, will trump novelty every day. The Art of Fielding follows the trials and triumphs of 5 denizens of a middling midwest liberal arts college hard on the Lake Michigan shore of northeast Wisconsin, somewhere between Green Bay and Milwaukee. Westish is a safety school for preppies who can’t make it in the northeast. It’s current president, Guert Affenfelt, was a student there in the late ’60s. QB for the inept football team, he spent most of his senior year parsing a transcription of s speech given by Herman Melville on campus decades after Moby Dick, but of course years before any fame accrued to that transforming American novel.
Affenfelt’s senior thesis galvanized the campus into changing its team name to the Harpooners, and resulted in a statue of the author on a knoll overlooking the lake. Affenfelt went on to a career in literature studies, spending most of it in Cambridge at Harvard. But in his mid-fifties, after unsuccessfully trying to single-handedly raise his daughter, Pella, he was called back to Westish to lead the school into the 21st century.
Despite the grandeur of their name, the school’s teams were spectacularly inept. In baseball, they have not won a conference title in the entire 104 years of it existence. But Mike Schwartz, a hard-scrabble motherless child of Chicago’s Jewish ghetto, is determined to change that. At an American Legion tournament in Minnesota, he watches Henry Skrimshander display preternatural genius, never missing a play at shortstop, then staying after the final game to field 150 ground balls, each perfectly trapped, and cooly thrown to the same spot on the bored first basemen’s glove.
Henry is scrawny, however, and Schwartz must build into him all the other elements of baseball greatness – strength, a hitting eye, and love of the team. Henry rooms with Owen Dunne, who introduces himself as “your gay mullato roommate from California.” Owen is a skilled hitter, and an even better philosopher, so much that his teammates nicknames him “Buddha”.
The book’s quintet of lead characters, all of whom provide perspective for the story’s progression, is completed by Pella Affenfelt. Near the end of her senior year at Tellman Rose, the boarding school her father sent her to after one too many rebellions, she falls for a 30 year-old visiting architect, David. They elope to his loft in San Francisco, but after four years, she realises she has no life of her own. Dependent on Prozac, she leaves with nothing but her handbag and the clothes on her back, showing up at her dad’s on-campus apartment to once again complicate his life.
These five characters are all treated with honesty and transperancy. All except Henry. For most of the book, he remains a cipher, an icon of perfection, singlemindedly turning himself into a first round draft prospect by his junior year.
But this is not a baseball novel. Harbach does not seem to have an in-depth feel for the game, the academic’s romantic love of its nuances and endless mind games. Nor is it a novel of academic manners, although set entirely on a college campus. This book, in the end, is about these five people, their flaws and fears, their comings together and fallings apart. And in the end, it’s those stories which both transport and motivate.
While Harbach has written a true page turner, he has done it outside of any usual genre contraints. I’m sure each reader will identify more closely with one or another of the five leads. I found both Henry and Affenfelt attracting me, providing some valuable insight and lessons.
The college president is both a leader and a child of the 60’s. As we are learning, that is a hard combination to hold, and often results in dramatic tragedy (see: Clinton; Gingrich). Affenfelt, after a life of bachelor stoicism, does find love and begins rebuilding his family. But he can’t make it last.
Henry learns that the pursuit of athletic perfection is, in the end, futile. When he starts to unravel, there is no center to hold him together, and he seems to disappear completely. But he remains central to the story, and Harbach continually teases us with the possibility that a happy ending is on the horizon.
But the journey, not the resolution, is what gives this book its depth. Clever plotting, respect for his characters, their background and future, and a robust sense of place – an inland seashore – are what make this make well worth attention to all of its 520 pages. Once I got halfway through, I had to finish it as quickly as possible. And Harbach even lets us exit gently, tidies up loose ends, and brings our five friends back together in the final set piece. Then the book ends as it began, with Henry fielding grounders on a hardpack clay diamond.