Book Review: The Art of Fielding

Title: The Art of Fielding
Author: Chad Harbach
Format: Advance Reader Copy
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co. | Hachette
Pub Date: Sept 2011
Read: July 2011
Source: BEA
Why: As I passed through the Hachette booth, this book was placed into my hands. It sounds almost mythic when put that way, but honestly, I knew NOTHING about this book going in and initially thought, why the hell did I take this? Maybe I should have said no and given someone else a chance to get a copy. But you know what? Now I’m glad that woman put this book in my hands.
Fulfills Challenge? Yes
Notes: Something that I’ve left off some of my baseball-related posts is that there was a period of time after I became of fan of the sport that I didn’t watch it a whole lot, that I was only marginally interested. For example, when the Yankees won the World Series in 2009, the only games I watched were the postseason games. Why? Because for three years I worked the late shift at Barnes and Noble, which prevented me from seeing most games. In fact, to catch some of the crucial postseason games that year, I had to make an excuse to leave work early. Being unable to really watch baseball, the sport lost some of its stranglehold on me. Why am I bringing this up now? Because my reading of this book seems to have coincided with a resurgence of love for the game. It’s more likely that I chose to read this book when I did because I felt the re-kindlings of love, but regardless, this book seems to have arrived at precisely the right moment in my life.

Review/Thoughts:
This book is getting a great deal of hype and with good reason. I want to do this a little differently and talk about the books flaws first because I’d rather end on a positive note than a negative one. I did really love this book, and to end on the flaws might imply otherwise, especially since it usually takes me longer to explain what I didn’t like about a book than what I did. So let’s go!

Synopsis from the jacket copy:

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.

Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry’s gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners’ team captain and Henry’s best friend, realizes he has guided Henry’s career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

The reason I’ve brought this up (when usually I ignore the synopsis in my reviews) is that it relates back to a couple of the problems I had with this book. First and foremost, of the five characters, only four of them get the close third-person treatment. The fifth is always seen through other characters’ eyes, which ultimately does the novel a disservice. The character given the shaft is Owen, the gay roommate and teammate who gets involved in a dangerous affair. He is, for all intents and purposes, voiceless. Why does this matter? Because ultimately Owen’s homosexuality seems to serve as a plot device for the other characters, or should I say, one character in particular. It almost doesn’t matter that Owen is gay except that it serves as a major plot point for another character’s story arc. In fact, the dangerous affair in question isn’t really dangerous for Owen so much as it’s dangerous for the person he’s involved with. This wouldn’t have bothered me one bit if he hadn’t been given the jacket copy treatment, which seems to suggest that Owen is given more story than he actually is. To have this gay character in the novel but never really address his struggles as a gay man seems a little strange to me. I understand that everyone’s coming out story is different and some people are able to face the world better than others due to family support, resources, etc. But this is a guy who chooses to be on his college baseball team. While I do appreciate that Owen himself is not reduced to stereotypes, the fact that he’s able to join this baseball team and no one, not a SINGLE player, gives him grief for his sexual orientation seems painfully unrealistic to me. I’m not saying all the players should have been assholes, as that would have been just as stereotypical, but I have a hard time believing that not one person would have been a close-minded jerk about this situation. I would have loved to see how that played out, how Owen and the other team members dealt with it, etc. Even the most liberal colleges will have students who are not liberal or open-minded. Why not show that? There was an opportunity to give this character a more multi-faceted storyline to complement his multi-faceted personality, but unfortunately that opportunity was passed up.

And then there’s Pella (here’s where my own biases come in, and I fully admit that). It drove me nuts that she not only wasn’t into baseball but was rather dismissive. Yes, I know not everyone likes baseball (or sports even), that there are many women who don’t get it and will never get it. But (BUT!) she’s also the only woman in a novel full of men (there are a few very minor female characters, but she’s the only major character who is female). For the love of all that is literary did she have to be the only woman AND averse to sports? I don’t wish to compromise her character, but if there had been other female characters to balance it out, I’d be grumbling a lot less. And of course, the fact that she is the only female character in a sea of males is problematic as well, but I did feel that her character was fully developed. Though she was important to the others’ stories, she still had her own motivations and demons to fight. We were able to get inside her head and understand where she was coming from because she was given the close third person treatment, unlike Owen. So although I totally wish she loved the sport as much as the guys in this novel, she is actually given much fuller treatment than Owen.

The final problem is the ending. Toward the end things started feeling more rushed. The novel is a little over 500 pages, so I don’t see what harm another 10-20 would’ve done. I know, I know, telling the reader too much runs the risk of spoon-feeding him or her, but dammit, certain conflicts just seemed to resolve themselves without explanation. Oh, you were adamant about not taking that job before but now you’re cool with it? Why? What brought on the change of heart? Oh you two broke up/had a fight and some major shit went down in the interim but hey, you’re back together now like it’s nothing! I’m sorry, what? What the hell happened in those two months the novel decided to leave out? Don’t get me wrong, I actually loved the last few chapters and loved the ending itself, but those missing months … I NEED THEM BACK. The conflicts were not unresolvable, so I’m not complaining about the resolutions themselves, but these were very real problems that needed to be dealt with, not just skimmed over.

Alright, so enough negativity, what did I love about the novel? Well, it only took me 3 or 4 days to read this book despite its heft. 500 pages? Pssh! They fly by. I probably could have read this book in even less time to be honest. The novel does a lot without trying too hard, which is part of the problem I have with a novel like The Corrections for example. It’s not that it’s not good, it’s that you can feel Franzen exerting his authority on every page. There is none of that here. The book feels effortless but still meaningful. It seems almost unbelievable that a book about baseball could be so relevant and offer this much insight, but of course, baseball is just the lens here through which we observe the many facets of human behavior. You can tell that Harbach knows what he’s talking about because the book is firmly rooted in baseball, but he never bores the readers with too many details that will read like a foreign language if they’re unfamiliar with the sport. People who aren’t fans of baseball can still fully appreciate the book and take something away from it.

The characters are flawed but sympathetic all the same. Their motivations are complex, as they should be, and not always fully understandable, in the ways that sometimes we’re a mystery even to ourselves. Their experiences are vastly different, and I can’t imagine that there isn’t at least one character for most people to relate to on some level, not that I think it’s absolutely necessary to relate to characters, but it’s a complaint many people have so there you are, a novel with something for (mostly) everyone. The strengths of this novel far outweigh any of the flaws I mentioned, so please go out, buy it, read it, love it.

Final Verdict: