The Art of Fielding

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, is an interesting hybrid--a mixture of the old-fashioned baseball story, such as Ring Lardner's Alibi Ike, with the contemporary campus novel, of which there are many (since so many literary novelists teach for a living). The result is a lovely work, if not at times overly precious.

The book is set at the fictional Westish College, on the shore of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. The characters are mostly on the baseball team. Mike Schwartz is the burly captain and catcher, and when, at an American Legion game, he spots a weak-hitting but brilliant-fielding shortstop, Henry Skrimshander: "Putting Henry at shortstop--it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before. By the fourth inning he was directing the other fielders, waving them left or right, correcting their tactical miscues."

Mike convinces Henry to come to Westish from his home in South Dakota, and a few years later, they have put together a great team. Henry's bible is "The Art of Fielding," by his hero, Aparacio Rodriguez (also fictitious, but certainly an amalgam of Luis Aparicio and Ozzie Smith). Through a strict training regimen, Mike has turned Henry into a good hitter, and scouts are hovering, telling him he'll be the first shortstop taken in the draft.

Meanwhile, the other thread of the novel involves the college's president, Guert Affenfelt. He was a Westish alum, and discovered, in the dingy library archives, that Herman Melville once visited there, giving the school some cache. A Melville statue now sits on the campus, facing the lake, and the team is renamed the harpooners. Two things are going on with Guert: his daughter, Pella, has returned after a bad marriage, and Geurt is in love with a male student, Owen Dunne, who is Henry's teammate.

A book like this is deceptively brilliant because it seems so easily written. Nothing is strained--each sentence flows beautifully, without gilding. It's not exactly Hemingway-esque, but neither is it Melville-esque. At one point, Guert reads Chekhov to Owen, and that's what it seems like to me--these characters are like Chekhov's, constantly searching, futilely, for happiness.

Owen, who is gay, is on the team, but is openly so, and this is not a story like The Dreyfus Affair or Take Me Out--he announces he's gay to the coach when he tries out, and nothing more is spoken about it. Instead, the baseball story is one of the mysteriously sudden inability to perform. Henry, who has tied the record for error-free games in college baseball, throws wildly one day and hits Owen in the head while he's sitting in the dugout. He's ultimately okay, but Henry is not, and like Steve Blass, Chuck Knoblauch, and Steve Sax, it gets into his head. Suddenly he is unable to throw.

All of this builds toward the Division III three college championship game, and I won't say more than that. Harbach, who obviously knows his literature, also knows his baseball, and when I read a novel about baseball that doesn't raise my hackles about something inconsistent or wrong, then that's a real compliment. There's a love triangle between Mike, Henry and Pella that is a bit sudsy, but the nonbaseball conclusion, in which a story from Ralph Waldo Emerson's life is replicated, is not as realistic as the baseball, but moving none the less.

Harbach slips into the overly precious with some of his character's names. Skrimshander and Affenfelt are odd but feasible, but Sooty Kim, Quentin Quisp, Adam Starblind and Craig Suitcase? I could see the Starblind as a nod to Melville, but Quisp is a serial, and who has ever heard anyone named Suitcase? These names aren't even worthy of Thomas Pynchon.

Baseball fans and bookworms frequently intersect in a Venn diagram, and that's no different here. To wit: "But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric--not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Better versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?"