The most hyped novel this fall (that is before Jeffrey Eugenides had a frickin’ billboard in Times Square for The Marriage Plot) deserves all the accolades and buzz it gets. Though I have to admit that the monster advance and Harbach’s (an editor at lit journal n+1) constellation of Big Six Publishing connections as detailed in the now-infamous Vanity Fair article by friend (of course) Keith Gessen would make any aspiring novelist grit their teeth and shake their fist at the sky.
Set at Wetish College, a fictional Division III liberal arts college in Wisconsin, it tells the story of hard-working prodigy shortstop Henry Skrimshander who loses his ability to make simple throws to first base (a la Steve Blass/Chuck Knoblauch et al.) and the effect it has on the lives and loves of his mentor and team catcher Mike Schwartz (Swartzy!), his suave roommate Owen Dunne, Wetish president and Herman Melville scholar Guert Affenlight and his daughter the beautiful Pella Affenlight.
Critics have been bending over backwards to point out that the novel is “about more than just baseball, it’s about life” (which is code for women, who make up like ninety percent of fiction readers, will like it too). And it’s true, but really, IT IS a book about baseball and that’s why it’s so enjoyable. A lot of the “literary” aspects and plot points, though well done, aren’t anything you haven’t seen before in a campus novel.
In fact, I can imagine Michael Chabon reading it and checking his computer to see if this wasn’t some manuscript buried in his hard drive. 1. Baseball-check 2. Themes of male friendship-check 3. A messed up college faculty member-check 4. An out-of-left-field gay affair-check 5. The ordinary elevated to the level of mythic- check. 6. Over 500 pages-check. 7. A character named Phlox- check! 8. A baseball hitting a spectator changes the course of everyone’s lives- okay, that’s John Irving.
But that’s just me being snarky, because I loved and read the hell out of this book. And as a former little league shortstop, I got the cold shivers just thinking about the dreaded throwing “yips” that Henry suffers from.
To sum up, in conclusion, restating my original thesis, I liked the book better than Bernard Malamud’s The Natural which I read this year, but not as much as Matt Christopher’s The Kid Who Only Hit Homers which I read when I was nine.
I’d give you a more detailed review, but dude, I’ve got my own book to write (see the upper corner of the blog to track my progress).
