P&P Reading Club: Patrick Dubuque on The Art of Fielding Chapters 18-33

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Patrick

he art of fielding by chad harbachI have a hard time with modern novels.  In a comment last week, Carson noted that he is “largely prejudiced against books in which characters have ‘emotional problems’ and in which they make ‘poor life decisions.’”  I tend to feel the same way.  The hand-wringing of the postmodern world, and its infatuation with the struggle of mankind against the self, wears on me at times.  Sure, we’re thrust into an unforgiving and chaotic world, isolated and aimless.  I get that.  But this doesn’t mean we have to sulk about it.

And in a sense, that’s why I had high hopes for The Art of Fielding: because baseball is designed to avoid this, to provide an agreeably meaningless diversion that entertains us and passes the time.  It’s meant to be fun.  But as we move into the second quarter of the novel, the game (and the novel itself, at times) loses this merriment: Henry and Mike both find themselves praying for rain, and the game has become a chore to play and to read about.  We’re lost in the maze of each person’s head, impotent and surly.  Henry is basically mimicking Camus’ Stranger, who developed his own form of Steve Blass Disease as he gunned down his Algerian.

Harbach’s characters are rich, intricate, and alive; all except Henry, who bores me.  His predictable fall and rise forms the skeleton of the novel, which we accept out of necessity.  Yet the character himself, so myopic in his pursuit of success, has little connection with the world around him.  His tight-knit relationship with Mike is told, rather than shown, and he’s nearly useless around every other character, even as a foil.   His insecurities are buried so deep that they rarely break past the barrier of the third person singular.  Even Siddhartha was worth a laugh before getting his life in order.

Instead, I find myself drawn to Pella, who orbits farthest from the game.  Part of her charm, of course, is that her fall predates the start of the novel; she’s already in spring when the others face winter.  But there’s also a sporadic, attractive tendency in Pella toward order; she’s scarred and wise, but she’s also willing to throw herself into someone else’s pile of dirty dishes.  I hope that her wit (and Owen’s, who reminds me of Sebastian from Brideshead Revisited) can find its way into the hearts and minds of these poor tragic heroes, and liven the place up a little bit.

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Why I Want the Rangers to Win the World Series

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Eric

Sometimes it takes the games starting for the compass needle in my heart to flicker and point me to my true north. My true north this year lies a few miles outside of Dallas. In other words, I want the Rangers to win the World Series.

This is news to me. A professor friend of mine would tell me not to worry about the fact that I am suddenly a Rangers fan — that we are all animals and sometimes we feel strange feelings and that’s all there is to it. But explaining secondary fandom (or postseason adopted fandom) is one of our favorite pastimes here at P&P so I won’t follow my professor’s hypothetical advice. Instead I will just try desperately to explain why I am rooting for the Rangers instead of the perfectly likable teams in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Tampa.

The first thing about the Rangers is that last year I picked them to make the postseason, then to win the World Series. I had little attachment to the franchise before 2010, but the prediction (which had no stakes, I admit) gave me a rooting interest. Maybe that interest is lingering because they were so fun to watch last season and because they came so close to making me look brilliant and because they fell to my sworn baseball enemies the Giants.

The 2011 edition of the Rangers is very similar. They lost Cliff Lee, who is my favorite starting pitcher in all of baseball to watch, but they replaced him with Adrian Beltre, who is my favorite defensive player to watch and sort of a mascot for my baseball fandom. I had my Bar Mitzvah the year Beltre debuted in LA. I moved to college in Seattle the year he moved to Seattle. I had a bunch of terrible personal crises and got laid off the year Beltre was hit in the groin by a grounder and missed a bunch of games.

Anyway, surrounding Beltre they have the most exciting top to bottom lineup in all baseball. Ian Kinsler just completed the quietest 7.7 WAR season ever. Elvis Andrus is still called Elvis and still brilliant to watch in the field and on the bases. Hamilton is a flame-tattooed superstar. Michael Young is a pissy non-MVP candidate who batted .338 out of spite. Nelson Cruz is himself. And Mike Napoli is basically Mike Piazza.

And this is before I get to the fact that their remaining starting pitchers (fare the well in bullpen duty, Ogando) are an ex-reliever, a guy from the Japanese league, and two tallish guys with plain names who throw really hard. Three of them are lefties! Three!
The animal inside me is not a beast but some clawed and antlered thing.
But wait, you say. The Rangers were once owned by the unpopular pre-presidential George W. Bush who often sits smiling in a box on the field level. Their current CEO, Nolan Ryan, is the scowliest jowliest man in all of baseball and more than likely a fascist. And the two are friends! Plus there was that whole Tom Hicks/MLB Rescue debacle. Cheering for the Rangers, you say, is basically the baseball equivalent of voting for Rick Perry in an important primary straw poll.

To this I give you Hank Steinbrenner. And Tony LaRussa. And Chase Utley’s hair. The negatives are out there for every team (though they are harder to spot for the Rays and Brewers, I admit). But Hank Steinbrenner’s asshole comments don’t make Curtis Granderson any less exciting. Tony LaRussa’s faux-intellectual over-managing doesn’t make me want Lance Berkman to lose at what might be his last shot at a ring. And Chase Utley’s hair doesn’t make Vance Worley any less surprising.

So what I’m telling myself here — because really I am who I’m talking to — is that it’s okay to root for the Rangers because Nolan Ryan’s pompous arms-crossed in a windbreaker aura is not enough to cut into the joy of a Ron Washington press conference or Neftali Feliz fastball. The needle in my heart has flickered. The animal inside me is not a beast but some clawed and antlered thing. And though most of my exes don’t live in Texas, my favorite one does. That’s enough. Go Rangers.

In Reading Club news, we continue this week with chapters 18-33 of The Art of Fielding. Try to have them read by Wednesday!

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After Something Real: Chris Farley and Batting Stances by Tom Ley

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Ted

Tom Ley writes for The Good Men Project, and he contributed to 1990s First Basemen Week with The Big Cat and the Water. You can email him at leyt345(at)gmail(dot)com.

When I was a kid I had two discernible skills. The first was the ability to imitate the batting stances of my favorite baseball players. The second was the ability to act out Chris Farley’s “Matt Foley” sketch from Saturday Night Live in its entirety.

For a long time, I thought that these two skills had nothing to do with each other. Matt Foley made me laugh, so I imitated him. I loved baseball, so I imitated my favorite baseball players. That was that- until recently.

A few nights ago I was in the throes of a particular kind of boredom that only extensive Internet surfing can cure, and I came across this picture of Farley:

Naturally, as a former understudy of the man, this picture had a lot of impact on me. I expected that, but what I didn’t expect was for this picture to make me think about baseball.

We’ll come back to the baseball, but first I want to discuss Chris Farley.

Anyone who knows anything about Farley and the tragic nature of his death will immediately understand why this photograph is so haunting. It’s hard to say whether or not the photo is staged or candid, but in my mind it doesn’t really matter. It’s very rare for a picture to so accurately capture the spirit of its subject. This is Chris Farley, the court Jester who donned a crown that’s shine only brought the shadows closer.

The darkness invoked by this photograph is the same darkness that made Farley’s comedy so brilliant. On the surface he was just the “Funny Fat Guy” of his era, but that’s not what makes him memorable. What makes me miss him still to this day was his unique ability to successfully incorporate an undeniably authentic sense of anxiety and desperation into each of his characters.

Take a moment to watch this classic Matt Foley sketch.

This sketch isn’t funny because it features a fat man yelling and falling through a coffee table. It’s funny because Farley so convincingly plays up the “broken man” aspect of the Foley character. He forces the audience to confront the pain and sadness of a life that has slipped its last rung, and then he forces us to laugh at it. A comedian can only pull off a feat like this if he allows pieces of himself to seep into the performance. It’s authenticity that turns Matt Foley in a hilarious force of nature rather than an awkward sock puppet. When he croaks out his famous line about living in a van down by the river, it’s not hard to imagine Farley himself ending up in a van down by the river, thrice divorced.

I find it less than coincidental that the names Foley and Farley so closely resemble each other.

Even as a kid I think I was subconsciously appreciative of Farley’s ability to incorporate his demons into his comedy. I loved the fact that he was willing to show his audience so much of himself, and that we were allowed to embrace the imperfections he revealed to us. We were allowed to love him not in spite of his ugliness, but because of it.

I thought about all of these things as I looked at the photograph in the pale light of my laptop, rehashing all of Farley’s best guttural one liners in my head, and I realized that it was an attraction Farley’s authenticity that drove me to imitate his most memorable character.

Which brings us back to baseball, and more specifically, batting stances.

Baseball is a game that is governed by the rigidity of a diamond and a rule book, and it leaves little room for self expression. There are only so many ways that a player can field a grounder, swing a bat, and dive for a ball in the gap. Some players do these things better than others, but in the end they are all essentially going through the same set of motions.

But not when they are standing at the plate.

When a player steps to the plate, he is given the opportunity to allow some of his true self to seep into his on field demeanor. Gary Sheffield always played the game with a focus in his eyes that hinted at an unseen intensity boiling inside of him, and yet this intensity had nowhere to manifest itself while he was forced to loiter silently in left field. Things changed when he stepped into the box, though. There he was given the opportunity to set free some of his fire, and he did so by violently cocking his bat back and forth, forcing everyone to take notice.

Ken Griffey Jr. always possessed a swagger and athleticism that seemed too big for a stadium to contain. Centerfield was never quite big enough to reveal his true potential, and the youthful cockiness of his backwards facing cap was always snuffed out once batting practice was over; the game demanding that he straighten his bill. This cockiness returned once he stepped up to the plate. He’d stand upright and nonchalant, his elbow cocked high while the rest of his body waited patiently to begin that smooth, unmistakable hitch towards first base once the ball was hit. Swagger oozed out of him while he stood in the box, enough that it was almost impossible to imagine that he was about to do anything other than hit a home run. For me, Griffey Jr. was the most captivating version of himself during those few moments that he spent standing at home plate.

For players like these, the batter’s box was a limitless space, free for them to fill with whatever form of self-expression they wished.

More importantly, players are allowed to take advantage of the expressive space of the batter’s box without fear of scorn or judgement. So many sports, baseball in particular, demand that the action on the field be sanitized. Athletes are expected to maintain a stiff modicum of what is considered professionalism when they are on the field, and anyone who attempts to blur the lines between the two is often shunned by the fans and media. Think players like Carlos Zambrano and Milton Bradley, who allowed their to bleed onto the field, only to get written off as cartoonish, insignificant caricatures. We don’t allow ourselves to embrace an athlete’s raw personality as something that can inform their performance on the field in a way that makes them more compelling to watch. Instead, we often consider such a phenomenon to somehow be an affront to the sanctity of the game.

As a fan of the game, this makes me sad. I’m sad because I’ve realized that I watch athletes and comedians for precisely the same reason; I want to be entertained, and what’s real is often what’s most entertaining.

That’s why I spent so many hours perfecting Sheffield’s violent wiggle and Foley’s broken wail. I was after something real.

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P&P Reading Club: Dayn Perry on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Eric

he art of fielding by chad harbachDayn Perry is a senior writer at NotGraphs and skilled Reggie Jackson biographer.

This runs long, but I’ll do better at reining it in going forward …

“The last time I forced myself to slog through a work of fiction that did not sufficiently move me was during my undergraduate years, which were so long ago as to devastate. Anyhow, I was assigned to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain over my December break. The work in question, it turned out, featured far too much time in a tuberculosis sanatorium, far too many lengthy disquisitions by something called “Herr Settembrini,” and far too much anguish on my part. I sweat, I wept silently, I forwent the viewing of important bowl games. And for what? A sense of completeness and academic calm that could’ve been mine after mere and stolen moments with that bumble-beed miracle known as “Cliffs Notes.”

After this experience, I took a monastic vow never to complete a work of fiction that, according to my own dubious and capricious standards, did not merit completion. Since then, I’ve been accordingly preoccupied with the exact moment at which a novel crosses the threshold that separates, for me, Magic Mountain-ness from “A Book I am Willing to and Perhaps Delighted to Finish”-ness.

In the curious case of The Art of Fielding, this moment occurred for me, your current interlocutor, probably when I first cracked the spine. (Fair enough: I’m reading it on the iPad, so I cracked no literal spines. But you know what I’m saying. Don’t you?) Specifically and honestly, though, I was taken at the closing words of Chapter 15, when Affenlight “truly was a fool,” and then, seconds later, “was renewed.” There was something ineffably real and endearing about the set-up and sequence. I knew what I already suspected, which is that I was in.

So, my question: At what moment did you determine, from on high, that The Art of Fielding had secured and earned your readerly attentions for good and all?

Also, Skrimshander = Scrimshaw!”

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P&P Reading Club: Navin Vaswani on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Eric

he art of fielding by chad harbachNavin Vaswani is a writer extroardinaire at NotGraphs and the lone Canadian participating in Reading Club.

I’ve got a couple of confessions: One: I don’t recall having read any baseball fiction; if I have, I don’t remember the book(s). And, two: I like most everything that I read. What can I say, I’d never make it as a critic. I’ve found the first 135 pages of The Art of Fielding to be enjoyable, to be readable, even though I find much of the book not believable. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine Owen Dunne a member of the Westish Harpooners, the “Buddha” the absolute furthest from a baseball player. I also wasn’t expecting Westish President Guert Affenlight to be gay, and to be falling in love with Owen, the improbable baseball player and easily the book’s most eccentric character so far. Again, just not very believable. But that’s why it’s fiction, I suppose.

I am pleased with the array of characters we’ve so far been introduced to. At first, through the book’s initial chapters, I couldn’t help but think of John McDonald when reading about Henry Skrimshander. A wizard, a savant, in the field, and nothing more. Until he was taken under his wing by Mike Schwartz, the thinking man’s baseball player. By now, we know where we stand with each of our protagonists: Will Henry’s errant throw be the first of many? It has to be. What will become of Schwartz? It is Henry’s turn to return the favour, and take care of him? Will Guert Affenlight pursue a relationship with Owen, a student at the college he presides over? I can’t see it happening, which means it probably will. I don’t really know what to make of Pella, who might be the one to save Schwartz, instead of Henry.

I’m not sure how much of the book I was expecting to be about baseball, but think Harbach has a struck a decent balance, so far. He’s a strong writer, as the depth of the characters proves. My question, what I’m interested to find out as we read further, is: How much of an impact will the happenings on the diamond, on the field, have on the lives of The Art of Fielding’s main characters? It seems as though baseball, the game, is secondary. Both to the plot, and to the characters. Life happens, and baseball is the escape. While I’m finding certain parts of the book a bit of a stretch, that’s one that certainly rings true.

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P&P Reading Club: Pete Beatty on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Eric

he art of fielding by chad harbach Pete Beatty is a future boss at The Classical and P&P’s resident Jim Thome scholar.

Some people will demur but “Guert Affenlight” is a truly excellent ridiculous name for a fictional character. “Guert Affenlight” is exactly the kind of name that college presidents/the over-accomplished sometimes are burdened with. I actually have a theory that the book publishing world (where I work), being a demimonde with a lot of unreconstructed WASPs and other old-line elites, has a disproportionate share of ridiculous names. I actually keep an Evernote file of “NARP” (Not A Real Person) names, which Guert Affenlight would be right at home in.

But beyond his pitch-perfect fake name, I’m not sure what to make of President Affenlight, who just strolled in and gayed (I mean that in a judgment-free way) everything up (and anyway, this novel is homoerotic from the copyright page onward– Mike Schwartz angrily whispers the word “pussy” at Henry, who ignores it! Symbolism! I solved literature!). I was just getting comfortable with this novel turning into a male gay-supremacist version of I Am Charlotte Simmons (fuck you guys for making fun of me, I liked that book) about the lower-middle-class souls-in-crisis of Schwartz and Skrimshander, and now I have to deal with Guert, who is a real adult with problems more complex than a rare throwing error or law school admissions. I’m rambling, but so far so good, right? I blazed through pages 1 through 117 in what felt like an hour. Good job everyone, especially the author.

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P&P Reading Club: Megan Wells on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Ted

he art of fielding by chad harbachFind more of Megan Wells at Around the Horn from Aerys Sports.

Despite finding the initial pacing a little strange, I’m enjoying The Art of Fielding. My biggest difficulty, though, has been finding a character to identify with. Schwartz, who strikes me as the most complex and engaging character, hovers around the periphery like a deus ex machina. Affenlight seems deliberately reserved; Pella has only just been introduced.

And then there’s Henry.

I went into the book wanting to identify with Henry and, if I’m honest, to live vicariously through him a bit. But so far, there’s no hook. On the field, he’s a wizard: inhumanly perfect, unrelatable (in spite of the oh-so-scrappy Eckstein parallels I couldn’t help drawing). Off the field, he’s as close to a blank slate as a human being can get. His strongest relationship is with Schwartz, but even then, the catcher serves–from Henry’s perspective, anyway–more as the human avatar of baseball’s influence on Henry’s life than as a foil to draw out his personality. In much the same way Aparicio Rodriguez does via his book, Schwartz tells Henry who Henry is.

I think the book knows this, though. At the very end of chapter 11, we get “Without Schwartz, come to think of it, there was hardly even any Henry Skrimshander.” My hope is that we’re being set up for Henry to find himself a little when baseball leaves him. Whether that will require the absence of Schwartz or a shift in Henry’s understanding of him will be interesting to see.

On an unrelated note, I wanted to give props to Pella’s feminist aside in chapter 14. “She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.” It was a pleasant surprise in a novel that could have easily stayed in boys’-club territory, and I think it deserves pointing out.

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P&P Reading Club: Patrick Dubuque on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Ted

he art of fielding by chad harbachFind Patrick right here, and at Notgraphs.

In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of the novel thus far is the excerpt from The Art of Fielding within the actual novel. The rules read as though they pertain to a certain one-legged batting stance, rather than the mechanics of playing shortstop. Meanwhile, the book pulls its own literary weight, serving as the connection, always necessary, between the game and life. Every baseball novel must, in some way, defend the game of baseball, just as every novelist must attach his or her characters to the human condition in order to make them matter. The book within a book is an interesting way of making that promise.

I particularly love how Harbach is able to use this passage to toy with the reader through the means of irony. Rule 3 (There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being) is one of the most blatant, all-encompassing uses of foreshadowing I can recall, a dead giveaway of the book’s entire theme. Having done this, Harbach then tosses in a final rule, 213 (Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does) without explanation, almost mischievously.

My question posed to the readership: why (thus far) is Omar Vizquel the only ballplayer referred to by his real name in the novel? Harbach isn’t concerned with disguising identities, since Aparicio Rodriguez (a dual-shortstop name in itself) is such an obvious pseudonym for Ozzie Smith. I’m told by those in the know (Eric) that the namedropping is no coincidence, but Vizquel’s name may as well have been blinking on the page. That Harbach chose to do this on page 97, with no other explanation, is an interesting choice to me.

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P&P Reading Club: Carson Cistulli on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Ted

he art of fielding by chad harbachFind Carson at Fangraphs and Notgraphs.

The achievement, for me, of the first 100 pages is two of its characters — both (a) the mythical shortstop (and hero of protagonist Henry Skrimshander) Aparicio Rodriguez, whose (fake) book The Art of Fielding gives Harbach’s own book its title and (b) Henry’s “gay mulatto roomate” and member of the Westish College baseball team, Owen Dunne.

The fictional Rodriguez is basically, so far as I can tell, Ozzie Smith as written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of him we know that he played for the Cardinals, that he’s the best defensive shortstop in baseball history, and that he played during Henry’s lifetime. Beyond that, though, there’s his book on fielding, which appears to be a sort of collection of aphorisms on same — some of which get all Lao Tzu up in this figurative piece. Like this pair, for example:

3. There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.

33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.

If the reader is familiar with Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow, that appears to be reasonable analog for Rodriguez’ prose style — what has never been referred to as “South American Nice.”

Owen Dunne bears a resemblance to characters from the campus novels of David Lodge in that he’s literate without being insufferable. The difference is that he’s an undergraduate — and usually Lodge’s characters are professors or, at the very least, graduate students. He tries out for, and makes, the Westish baseball team as a freshman, despite the fact that he doesn’t care whether he plays or not, spending most of his time reading on the bench. I believe — although I’m not sure — that one might describe him as insouciant. This exchange is a favorite of mine:

“Owen,” Hendry said excitingly, “I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini.”

Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked. “Really?”

“Runners on first and second,” Rick said. “I bet he wants you to bunt.”

“What’s the bunt sign?”

“Two tugs on the left earlobe,” Henry told him. “But first he has to give the indicator, which is squeeze the belt. But if he goes to his cap with either hand or says your first name, that’s the wipe-off, and then you have to wait and see whether –”

“Forget it,” Owen said. I’ll just bunt.

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P&P Reading Club: Adam Webb on The Art of Fielding Chapters 1 -17

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Ted

he art of fielding by chad harbachFind more of Adam at Everyday Footnotes.

Mea culpa guys! I mistakenly purchased The Art of Fiedler, an 81-chapter critical biography of the famed Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler, so if I lapse into commentary about his early training at the Hochschule für Musik Berlin or the tutelage of Karl Muck instead of Westish Colllege and Mike Schwartz, please forgive me.

Since I began reading the correct TAF, I have recommended it to many people. The book is exceeding my high hopes, and the fielding-as-metaphor hasn’t shown up yet. (Have I missed it?) I think it’s natural in assessing the book in chunks of ~100 pages, that I might nitpick (when something is going so well, the slight missteps are fascinating) so I want to be on the record: I am very excited to start chapter 18 as soon as I finish writing this.

The introduction of a few of the characters reminded me of the fabular qualities of some Fitzgerald (especially when he writes about the Midwest). Schwartz seems like an exaggeration of a real person but maybe that means he will stick in my mind forever like what’s-her-name in “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Along the same lines, Owen Dunne is somehow unrealistically real, more real than any person I have met. Pella Affenflight might fall too easily into that grand cliche of the promiscuous private school girl — but her whale tattoo cancels out my doubts about her character and the possible overkill of the Melville references.

The book was getting started well, thoroughly enjoyable, when my expectations were upended. At the end of the fifth chapter, Harbach moves us forward two years in the space of three pages and he does this in the least writerly way possible. A few chapters later, he pays off the heavy, obvious foreshadowing on page nine (“He caught the ball cleanly, always, and made, always, a perfect throw.”) by killing Owen. Except, as we learn two pages later, Owen is not dead. This sequence blew me away: I was shocked but felt the death had been earned, then I felt manipulated, then I was thrilled to have been manipulated so well and excited to learn what’s in store for Owen that required Harbach to hold onto him.

Last week I made two passing references to Michael Chabon. When I found Sal Phlox on the team in TAF, I figured Harbach was paying homage (a woman named Phlox is part of the love triangle in Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh). Because I haven’t found a Chabon link to Aparicio Rodriguez, I have to ask, is there any way an author puts an A. Rod. in a baseball novel if he doesn’t want the readers to think — even if only for irony’s sake — of A-Rod?

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