Harbach is particularly effective at rendering the quirky particularities of a team’s collective personality, the nicknames (Buddha, Schwartzy, The Skrimmer, Suitcase) and superstitions (no haircuts before game day, the inspirational quote in the pre-game huddle, yoga on the field). The protagonists possess clear, distinct voices and lovable affects, rendered in prose as pristine as a freshly mowed outfield. This four-person starting rotation, if you will, offers up infinite pleasures through alternating points of view, all in close third-person. There’s the hot baseball prospect at shortstop, Henry Skrimshander his catcher and mentor, Mike Schwartz the school president, Guert Affenlight and Affenlight’s once-estranged daughter Pella, returned to her father’s school after the dissolution of her marriage. In The Art of Fielding, debut novelist and co-founder and editor of N+1 magazine Chad Harbach taps into this ephemeral baseball consciousness through four characters at Westish College, a fictional small liberal arts school on Lake Michigan. And, as far as pastimes go, it’s a pretty nostalgic one. Strategic decisions, mountains of statistics, and deliberate sequencing converge on the field, transpiring into a kind of baseball rhythm before expiring into collective baseball memory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |