The Natural
Published in 1952, The Natural was something of a parody. As pointed out by Kevin Baker in the introduction to the edition I read: "Up until perhaps a generation ago, most public libraries still held shelves full of boys' sports novels. They were a venerable line of American hack writing, churned out relentlessly by sportswriters and novelists."
These books were about heroes, and imparted important life lessons. Malamud's book does none of that. His "hero," Roy Hobbs, is driven only by his hunger for fame, glory, money, and sex. Of course Robert Redford didn't play it that way.
I will refrain from here on in discussing the movie, which I will write about shortly. It retains the basic structure of the book, except for the ending: a young phenom, Hobbs, is on his way to try out with the Cubs. He happens to be riding on the train with "the Whammer," a Ruthian figure. While the train waits out a delay, Hobbs takes up a challenge to pitch to the great player, and strikes him out on three pitches. A woman, who has a fetish for shooting great athletes, ends Hobbs' dream by shooting him in the gut in a hotel room.
We cut to several years later. Hobbs is mounting a comeback, this time as an outfielder. We know nothing of what he has been up to the interim, but he still has the home-made bat he calls "Wonderboy." He signs with the New York Knights, mired in the second division and managed by the perpetually worried Pop Fisher, who has athlete's foot on his fingers. When the team's regular left fielder crashes into a wall and later dies of his injuries, Hobbs takes over, and in his first game he literally knocks the cover off the ball: "Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was the biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield."
Malamud's version of baseball, set in the pre-integration era, is probably too realistic for comfort. The owner of the team is a corrupt judge who is a skinflint. The sportswriter who covers the team, Max Mercy, is desperate to find out Hobbs' past, and comes to loathe him. A gambler is a little too intimate with the the team. And Hobbs, well: "The fans dearly loved Roy but Roy did not love the fans. He hadn't forgotten the dirty treatment they had dished out during the time of his trouble. Often he felt he would like to ram their cheers down their throats. Instead he took it out on the ball, pounding it to a pulp, as if the best way to get even with the fans, the pitchers who had mocked him, and the statisticians who had recorded (forever) the kind and quantity of his failures, was to smash every conceivable record."
The novel does follow a standard sports story template, with Hobbs leading the Knights on a rise in the standings. He then goes in a slump, but retains his form long enough to lead the team to a one-game playoff for the pennant. He is approached by the Judge to throw the game for a huge payoff. During that game he goes back and forth on whether he will honor the deal or not. Redford hit one into the lights. I'll leave it to the reader to find out whether the literary Hobbs does.
Malamud, basically, took the great American pastime and painted a portrait of the downside of the American dream. Hobbs lusts for everything, including the niece of Pop Fisher, Memo Paris, who had been the girlfriend of the player he replaced. This is the weakest part of the book, this romance of fits and starts; sharper is his fling with a fan, Iris Lemon, whom he has sex with, despite her revelation that she is a 33-year-old grandmother, which disgusts him. He is a thorough cad, a corruption of the American hero.
Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book is when Hobbs develops an insatiable hunger for food. "The Knights had boarded the train at dinner time but he stopped off at the station to devour half a dozen franks smothered in sauerkraut and he guzzled down six bottles of pop before his meal on the train, which consisted of two oversized sirloins, at least a dozen rolls, four orders of mashed, and three (some said five) slabs of apple pie. Still that didn't do the trick, for while they were all at cards that evening, he sneaked off the train as it was being hosed and oiled and hustled up another three wieners, and later secretly arranged with the steward for a midnight snack of a long T-bone with trimmings, although that did not keep him from waking several times during the the night with pangs of hunger."
I read that as a nightmare version of the American dream, a capitalist, consumerist monster who is driven by desire. This overeating lands Hobbs in the hospital during the last three games of the season, and he is weakened as he bats in the playoff game. He is a victim of his own lust.
Reading this book is not recommended for those who see only the romantic in baseball, or in America, for that matter, and you may want to take a shower afterward. Malamud clearly knows the game--there is nothing in it that rings false, baseball-wise--but he emphasizes the most unsavory aspects of it. But, as we baseball fans know even during labor strife and disgust over PED use, the game remains the literary pastime of the nation. This passage, when Hobbs strikes out the Whammer, is just brilliant:
"The third ball slithered at the batter like a meteor, the flame swallowing itself. He lifted his club to crush it into a universe of sparks but the heavy wood dragged, and though he willed to destroy the sound he heard a gong bong and realized with sadness that the ball he had expected to hit had long since been part of the past; and though Max could not cough the fatal word out of his throat, the Whammer understood he was, in the truest sense of it, out."
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