06 Oct 2011, by Eric
Pete Beatty is a future boss at The Classical and P&P's resident Jim Thome scholar.
Early-onset Steve Blass Disease. May-November blow jobs. Menial labor as an anti-neurotic therapeutic. Getting rejected from law school. Everyone at Westish College is bugging. At least some people are getting laid. After a hundred pages, we had a few ingredients for the conflict that would sustain narrative tension in The Art of Fielding--a prodigal daughter arriving at MKE, an inconvenient gay crush, Henry's creeping jitters. A hundred pages later, everybody's shit is falling apart. We might have seen Henry's neurosis coming, but Schwartz's crisis of confidence really deflated me. We are probably all suckers for a lower-middle-class character with a will to power, but Schwartz was really talking to me, as a bald pudgy guy who used to be a pudgy little league catcher. More worrisome to me than his money troubles or his law-school admissions woes (feel better, Schwartzy) is the dangerous relationship he's fallen into with Pella--both seem cautious, preoccupied with other things--Pella with rebuilding her world after the probable end of her marriage, Schwartzy with repairing his bond with Henry. It seems like they're going to hurt each other's feelings, badly, and soon.
Meanwhile, across the quad, President Affenlight and Owen are just as awkward--Owen seems almost to be taking advantage of the older man, and our dude Guert just sort of seems like he really, really wants to be with Owen. This week's reading was filled with some great passages--the best-of-20 sprints between Henry and Starblind were a brilliant piece, and Henry's affectless brooding is pitch-perfect (not to mention deepening). My question though--is everyone on board with Affenlight's motivations in romancing, or being romanced by, Owen Dunne? What is the older man seeking that he couldn't have found in the willing arms of Owen's mom or elsewhere? Does the Upper Midwest make you gay?
05 Oct 2011, by Ted
Find more of Adam at Everyday Footnotes.
These pages are packed with charm and dread. I loved the Westish Harpooners playing High School or Prison from the bus. Pella's over-thought panic over whether or not to clean Schwartz's dishes was hilarious and perfect. Even Owen's inability to widely open his mouth keeps me smiling widely a few days later.
My favorite moment in these chapters: "Opentoe College had some sort of evangelical mission that involved perpetual kindness and hopelessly outdated uniforms."
All of these moments of relief keep us moving through growing tension in the scenes while Affenflight's crush turns into an affair but his relentless self-doubt continues unabated. There's no comedy for me in Pella and Genevieve's misunderstanding of Guert's intentions during the dinner -- but I still enjoyed the heck out of it.
My guess is that no good comes from getting yourself mixed into Guert Affenlight's life. Schwartz's preference for drinking the president's Scotch instead of running off with his girl seemed like a bad omen and I am especially worried for Owen's mom, Genevieve. It's dumb to make predictions here only to be proven wrong in a matter of days -- but I think Genevieve will meet some sort of tragedy. Guert's secret love for the child, Owen, instead of the mother reminds me of the early chapters of Lolita and Dolores's mother's abrupt, parenthetical death ("picnic, lightning"). I'm sure there are more apt literary comparisons (Guert is no Humbert Humbert) but the necessary research would require the following uncomfortable search query: mother son love triangle.
As for Henry and his string of errors, more than anything I'm looking forward to learning what it leads to than reading about each poor throw. Henry's fall from perfection has already led to the introduction of college reporter, Sarah X. Pessel, who I hope will keep turning up. Which reminds me, does that X. even stand for anything?
05 Oct 2011, by Ted
Find more of Megan Wells at Around the Horn from Aerys Sports.
Well.
Quite a bit has happened since our last check-in on this literary odyssey. Destruction and creation, mostly - relationships forming between O and Affenlight, Schwartzy and Pella. Henry's apparent total loss of self-identity. During the first week, I felt like a lot of these characters were empty or had yet to be realized in any sort of relatable way. This week, there has been an almost embarrassing abundance of real, sympathetic detail in the interactions with even minor characters.
I found Pella's interaction with Chef Spirodocus surprisingly engaging. The Chef doesn't seem to fit in a neat box, but to have a great deal of unexpressed complexity. The sadness of his potato-spooning, the unheralded sacrifice that went into the grocery bag of food, the apparent depth with which he imbued tiny actions - they paralleled Pella's compulsive drive to wash dishes; paralleled Affenlight's obsession over the minutiae of his appearance in advance of Owen's visit; paralleled Henry's panicked overthinking of each in-game throw to first.
Most of these are day-to-day thoughts and mental states to which I can relate all too well. The new perspective, for me, comes from seeing this mundane side of a baseball field. As a fan - only ever an occasional right-fielder for a women's baseball league in Chicago - I've never really approached the performance of baseball with enough familiarity to have the tiny, obsessive, weighty thoughts that the Westish players do. The moment that stood out, for me, was Schwartzy taking the game - and Henry, really - into his own hands while facing Opentoe. He approached the first-base umpire with all the irritation of someone having a bad day at work, and his temper boiled over in exactly the same way. Familiar sensation, unexpected context.
My question to you, then, is this: has the book's detail reframed anything familiar for you, or given you a new perspective on something mundane?
05 Oct 2011, by Ted
As the carefully built structure that Henry Skrimshander has committed his life to fortifying against disorder systematically caves in on itself, our anxiety-ridden shortstop seeks solace in the ritualistic circular walk around the deck of the ferry, in the prescription drug-addled, disappointment-laden voyage that takes the boys back to their home at Westish College. These circular turns, which Rick O'Shea manages to transpose into a winding-down "like a toy," exemplify what had been gnawing on me as I read these chapters: performance.
Mike Schwarz employs "The Stare" to stir his teammates, employing motivational techniques that come less from experience than from some tape recorder buried within his reptile brain, to the point that he "felt a little off, a little odd, like he was playing himself on TV." He buoyed even himself with the performance, the familiar ritual of the man standing before his comrades on the eve of battle.
President Affenlight, caught up in a torrent of strange passions in his burgeoning affair with Owen, falls back on the deeply familiar ritual of reading out loud, of transposing the burden of his own emotion into the performance of distant, separate turmoil. Not to mention the college president's continual presence as the prime performer on behalf of the school's interests.
Baseball is a ritualistic game, and it attracts people who are interested in repetition, in a kind of tortured turning of the metaphorical wheel. The extension of this brilliant observation, of course, is that many people choose rituals of many kinds to manage their daily lives, far out of the realm of sport. College, in its way, is a four-year course in repetition management, in discipline, in regularity. Graduation is the great launch into life's disarray.
05 Oct 2011, by Patrick
I 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.