The Great American Novel

When Philip Roth died this past summer, I wanted to read a book in his honor (regular viewers may notice I have something of a necrology going here when it comes to authors, actors, or directors). I have read almost every thing Roth has ever written, though. One of a few I hadn't read was The Great American Novel, released in 1973, and he accomplished something that I suspect a lot of American writers, including this one, have wanted to do: he creates a whole baseball team from scratch. Not just a team, but a whole league.

A prologue introduces an old sportswriter, Word Smith (the first line is an homage to Melville: "Call me Smitty"). He is one of the few writers who want to keep alive the memory of the Patriot League, the third baseball league that ran concurrent with the National and American Leagues throughout the golden age of baseball. The Port Ruppert Mundys, great back in the '20s, but by the '40s, with the war going on, were a collection of has-beens and never-was, with players in their fifties, a catcher with one leg, and a rightfielder with one arm. "All of the Mundy utility players were proud, doting grandfathers, who passed much of their time on the bench exchanging snapshots of their offsprings’ offspring, while their less fortunate teammates were out on the field being beaten to a pulp."

Much of the book concerns the season of 1943, when the Port Ruppert Mundys, a hapless team, spends the whole season on the road, allowing their stadium to be used by the army for the war effort. Roth creates an entire 25-man roster, with names like Hothead Ptah, Applejack Terminus, and Nickname Damur, who is only 14 years old and weighs 90 pounds. But he starts the book with the legendary hurler, Gil Gamesh: "Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, Gil Gamesh. In the winter of ’33–’34, men and women and even little children, worried for the future of America, were talking about one or another, if not all three. What was the world coming to? What catastrophe would befall our country next?" Gamesh, the game's greatest pitcher, is thrown out of the league for purposely trying to kill an umpire with a fastball.

Many chapters of the book are individual set pieces, such as the Mundys taking on a team from a lunatic asylum, the manager, Ulysses Faircloth, teaching baseball to a tribe of Africans and almost ending up being cannibalized because he won't let them slide into first base after a walk, or a whole chapter on the history of midgets in baseball (Roth uses the Victorian-style introductions to chapters, which tells what's coming in that chapter, such as: "A chapter containing as much as has ever been written anywhere on the subject of midgets in baseball." In real baseball, there was one midget, but in the Patriot League there were two, one a pinch-hitter and one a pitcher, the latter blinding the former with a fastball.

The end of the book concerns the communist threat, and reveals that the Russians have been trying to destroy the Patriot League from within. I found the ending dated, even if we just had a presidential election that was tampered with by the Russians. I don't think baseball has the importance now that it did then. The Russians would today probably try to get to Tom Brady or LeBron James.

As with any novel by Roth, the language is virtuosic. Smitty loves alliteration, the the prologue has dizzying examples of it. Roth claimed it was the book he had the most fun writing, and it shows. It has the erudite stylings of of an Oxford don mixed with the whiff of the press box, sort of like the style of the plaques of Hall of Famers.

And it does talk about Roth's greatest theme: Jewishness. One of the owners of the Patriot League is a Jewish businessman. His son, a teenage prodigy, invents a type of breakfast cereal that leads the Mundys on an 11-game winning streak. When they stop eating it, though, they lose 31-0, with Nickname Damur getting thrown out trying to stretch a double into a triple in the ninth inning. This gives the manager a heart attack.