28 Sep 2011, by Ted
Find 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.
28 Sep 2011, by Ted
Find 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.
28 Sep 2011, by Ted
Find 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.
28 Sep 2011, by Ted
Find 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?
28 Sep 2011, by Ted
The characters who trawl the idyllic college campus of The Art of Fielding include a virtuosic young shortstop from the sticks who, though away from his small-time hometown for the first time, eschews romance and booze in favor of stadium stairs and skull crushers, a renowned college president whose road to achievement was defined by his desire to read every book in the known universe, and a magnetic and Machiavellian catcher who shacks up in a room in the athletic center to be closer to the epicenter of his sweat equity empire. In other words, these are hard-working folks, plying tedious, almost superhuman trades in a setting engineered to exude a sense of academic leisure.
This tension between the halls of pleasure and the thankless underpinnings of success, defines the first seventeen chapters of The Art of Fielding. Mr. Skrimshander, free from any earthly desire save the urge to field perfectly, plods across a landscape where statues gaze meditatively out over peaceful bodies of water without ever lifting his own, and as readers, we barely register that we're in college at all. Skrimmers' experience is defined by the complementary tutelages of Schwartz and O., and at this “college in a movie,” as Skrimmer thinks of it, he who was miraculously delivered from the grimness of South Dakota community college to the glory of the small liberal arts college by a hairy guardian angel, thinks that it is “that sameness, that repetition, that gave life meaning.”
Schwartz, for all of his charisma and his unquestioned love for Westish, stays but a half pace ahead of his own self-hatred, and drives on only to stay out of that dark maw. He knows the nooks and crannies of Westish too well, and threatens to destroy mystery altogether. El presidente, on the other hand, having conquered academia, finds the fires of mystery in the forbidden.
Pella, our resident lady, is the only character thus far who seems free to track the path that her passions carve. I, for one, hope that she isn’t punished for it. Already the determined and driven Schwartz has jumped the track on the cusp of graduation, and Henry can see the weird Siren call of money and success from where he stands. Indecision looms. The real world--enemy of the college campus--threatens to force these folks into critical decision-making, off the four-year track that’s laid in front of them.