The Art of Fielding

As the dark coolly draped over the heat-soaked desert foothills, I concentrated on the radio call for the San Francisco Giants series opener against the Rockies. The cool air outside the window where I sat and listened was no match for the crispness of the mile-high air in Coors Field. The stands sounded full, echoing just over the announcers banter, a tribute to the Rockies’ overachievement in the early weeks of the season. Maybe Tulowitzki is stealing signs, maybe not; maybe the team sneaks a non-humidor ball into the ump’s pouch at a critical time, maybe not. Even though I couldn’t see, I held my breath a little with each pitch, hoping Bumgarner, with his crane-like pivot, could sweep a 93 mph fastball over the corner of the show more plate. Or would the ball hang up just enough for the batter eye’s to widen with lust. As the final outs approached, the Giants were on top by a run thanks to a double that snaked into the left field corner, hit by a player that wore Rockies’ gray and purple last year. The Giants closed within one strike of victory. But the slight, wiry closer, the one with the beard sculpted to a gnome-like point, slotted a slider that a Rockies’ batter sent to the top of the wall in left field, scoring two. It’s only May. The Giants lead their division with one of the best records in baseball. It’s only one game. But listening to the excited voices of the announcers describing the path of the ball down the left field line turned my stomach. What is it about this game?

[The Art of Fielding], Chad Harbach’s debut novel, ponders the pull of the game, and how it mirrors life, transcending sport in so many ways. Not everyone sees that. Not everyone understands the game’s dichotomy: the routine interrupted by flashes of brilliant excitement and agony; the repeated failure broken by dizzying moments of success. Does that not describe life?

The book follows the life of Henry Skrimshander, a shortstop phenom, graceful and lithe on the field of play, but empty in all other ways except the pursuit of perfection. Playing college ball for a small, liberal arts college, ‘the Skrimmer’ develops an errorless streak that threatens to break records, only to see a rare errant throw destroy the face of a teammate. In that split second of failure, the minute slip of a finger, human fragility descends and consumes Henry. The doubt and confusion that follows, reflects the struggles of the people in Henry’s life: Schwartz, the captain of the team who suddenly loses his own single-minded path in life, Guert Affentlight, the college president who begins to pursue a love affair that will destroy his career; Pella, Guert’s daughter who is floundering from an abusively manipulative marriage. All of these obsessively single-minded people are confronted with the folly of life, the inability to control the ball as it teeters over the foul line, rolling independent and unmindful of everything around it, like life.

Harbach’s novel isn’t perfect, but even the most perfect of games often carries a blemish. Harbach occasionally loses his way in the narrative, almost working too hard to cobble a plot that carries his themes. Similarly, in Henry and Schwatz, he’s created such single-minded and obsessed people that their credibility as real humans comes into question – their workout routines, eating habits, and sleep schedules really push the boundaries of plausibility. But outside of these faults, Harbach presents an addictive read.

Baseball isn’t life; I know that somewhere in my rational brain. But in my heart, I see so much of life reflected on the field. Maybe that’s why I can’t stand to see the Giants to lose even one game, why I want every pitcher to pitch the perfect game, even though I know that the reality of life is that they will fail more often than they succeed. It is the search for perfection, the hope of permanent brilliance that keeps the heart alive. Harbach taps into that elusive knowledge with [The Art of Fielding], bringing a brief moment of brilliance into the routine of life.

Bottom Line: A baseball book that beautifully taps into the connections between the game and life.

4 ½ bones!!!!! show less

Henry Skrimshander is the “real deal”. A skinny, shy kid from South Dakota, recruited to play shortstop for Westish College in Wisconsin. His mentor is the team captain and catcher, Mike Schwartz and a strong friendship develops. The team begins to win, for the first time in school history and it appears Henry is on the way to the big time. During one fateful game, Henry makes an errant throw and suddenly he loses the magic and his future quickly begins to darken.
Yes, this novel is about baseball, but before you begin to head for the exits, I want to say, this book is about so much more. Like a young John Irving, this first time author, has created a wonderful world. It is about family, friendships and finding one’s path into show more adulthood. It’s smart, funny and perfectly paced. A home run all the way! show less

This book is slow to reveal its intelligence. It begins as if it will be a reverie on the zen of meeting your full potential - in this case, playing baseball. It continues as a comparison of relationships, and in particular, how the age divide can affect the outcome. And it reaches its apotheosis as a metaphor for T. S. Eliot’s great poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” that paean to ineffectuality that so typifies the human condition.

The story concerns five people whose lives become intertwined at Westish College in northeastern Wisconsin. One of them, Henry, is a baseball shortstop whose hero is the fictional shortstop Aparicio Rodriguez (presumably inspired by the the real-life shortstop Luis Aparicio). In the story, show more Rodriguez is the author of a vade mecum on playing baseball called “The Art of Fielding,” and Henry studies it religiously, just as he has studied the play of the shortstop:

"What he could do was field. He’d spent his life studying the way the ball came off the bat, the angles and the spin, so that he knew in advance whether he should break right or left, whether the ball that came at him would bound up high or skid low to the dirt. He caught the ball cleanly, always, and made, always, a perfect throw.”

Mike Schwartz, the catcher for the baseball team, takes Henry under his wing and helps him train and refine his skills. Mike is a natural coach, and basically takes over the job: "All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.”

Mike and Henry become close, but each thinks that the other’s perception of his own infallibility forms the basis of their friendship. For a while though, both the friendship and the infallibility work.

Henry’s roommate at Westish is Owen Dunne, a bright, somewhat posturing and effete intellectual who also, in an out-of-character turn, is the baseball team’s right fielder. Owen self-identifies as a “gay mulatto” and one almost gets the impression that he is gay for the same reason he likes to smoke pot and sit in espresso shops reading poetry. It is important to him to be seen in all of his arty manifestations.

The Westish baseball team begins to reap the benefits of the influence of Mike and Henry, and the wins start piling up. The team is called the Harpooners (Melville became the guiding spirit of this college after an important cache of his papers was discovered in its library).

Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish, is the one who discovered the Melville papers while working on his dissertation. Guert’s daughter Pella skipped college to get married, but now she returns to Westish to get her degree. (Pella’s mother died when Pella was three.)

Together, these five characters – Henry, Owen, Mike, Guert, and Pella - come to form a tightly interlocked matrix of hope, desire, disappointment and love that drives the second half of the book, and pulls us into its web by the tendrils of emotions that wind around the matrix.

Some of Harbach’s best writing about relationships concerns those early moments when insecurity vies with excitement for the obsessions of the actors. That nervous energy is exhibited in the following scene, when Pella has slept over a male’s house, and the next morning, sees all the dirty dishes and wants to wash them, but isn’t sure about the message it will send:

"It was a nice gesture, to do somebody else’s dishes, but it could also be construed as an admonishment: ‘If nobody else will clean up this shithole, I’ll do it myself!’ In fact, some version of that interpretation could hardly be avoided. She turned off the water. Even if [they] had been dating for months, unprovoked dishwashing might be considered strange. Meddlesome. Overbearing. Unless she dirtied the dishes herself: that would be different. Then the dishes should be done, and the failure to do them might pose its own problems. But the dishes weren’t hers, and [they] weren’t dating. Therefore the doing of dishes could only seem weird, neurotic, invasive.”

And that buildup of awe and happiness that comes with new love is shown ably in this observation: "Everything that floated through his life’s width…seemed loaded with such poignance that he found himself on the verge of country-music tears…”

Love ties the characters together, yes, but baseball provides an even sturdier glue. Schwartz sees baseball as a test of individual glory – not a melee sport dependent on team coordination, but as: "...a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. … When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?”

But for Schwartz, whose métier was coaching baseball, the contests were all vicarious: "He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around; this was his only skill.”

He claims he’s not sick of coaching itself, yet he "just didn’t want to wake up in twenty years and see behind him a string of lives he’d changed, stretching out endlessly, rah rah go team, while he himself stayed exactly the same. Stagnant. Ungreat. Still wearing sweatpants to work. He who cannot, coaches.”

T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock’s lament could easily have been Schwartz’s:

"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

Evaluation: Harbach takes on the existential challenge of the insignificance of man, expressed via the metaphor of playing baseball. Even as his characters struggle to make a mark in the world, most must resign themselves to the more common outcome of a quotidian life of mechanical repetition. Can love and companionship make it bearable? That’s the question the book leaves you to ponder, long after you turn the last page. show less

I absolutely loved this debut novel set at Westish College, a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin. Harbach seamlessly interweaves the stories of several main characters. Henry Skrimshander is the errorless shortstop who eats, sleeps, and breathes baseball. Mike Schwartz is a year older than Henry and pushes him ruthlessly. Owen Dunne is Henry's roommate and an improbable teammate who clips a booklight to his cap so that he can read on the bench. Guert Affenlight is the Westish president, who has just welcomed his daughter Pella back into his life. Across the span of a baseballl season, these characters deal with challenges both on and off the field, challenges that will ultimately alter the relationships among them.

It's hard to show more describe the plot of this book without giving too much away, but it's not the plot of this book that makes it one of the best that I've read this year. The story of Henry and the others is well-told, but it is the way that Harbach uses these specific events to explore bigger issues - issues of perfection and error, issues of identity and relationship, issues of love in its many forms - that really blew me away. Harbach writes in a straightforward and honest voice (a bit reminiscent of Richard Russo, perhaps?), a voice that I hope we hear more from. show less

A very satisfying novel (the author's debut). It's reminiscent of John Irving in its focus on character and place: you get to know the main players inside and out and they can be infuriating and pleasing. While baseball provides the context for most of the work, this is not a sports book and even someone who detests the National Pastime will find much to enjoy. The novel is set on a small Midwestern liberal arts college campus, and, in a sense, the work almost resembles a play given its emphasis on dialogue. It does not duck large issues and is one of the few mainstream books I can think of in which homosexuality and heterosexuality coexist peacefully. There's also a feeling of jump cuts; often, the author will advance the narrative show more obliquely and the technique works beautifully. Truly, as one of the blurb puts it: you don't want the book to end because you have become so familiar with the core characters--and their triumphs and disasters. show less

I have to admit, I'm not a sports fan. I never really had the patience to sit through a game. I used to watch baseball with my grandfather, though. I have fond memories of watching the 1972 World Series with him, although I remember the handlebar mustaches worn by the Oakland A's more than any outstanding play. Grandpa's enthusiasm for the game was contagious. A former ball player himself, he could communicate what was great about the game, and about the particular players in question. I suppose my liking for a good baseball story comes from nostalgia for those days, when we'd watch the Series on TV, or when he'd take me to a Pirates game, and we'd see the great Clemente play.

It's not just nostalgia, though. There's something about show more baseball that connects with all the themes of American literature. The pitiless lottery that is capitalism. The small town hick who achieves fame. Art vs. Commerce.. The heroic quest, whether it be for a white whale, or to fill one's life with meaning. The transition from boy to man. All of life is here. Or at least all of life that is particular to men. But that doesn't mean women won't enjoy it. Women who want to understand men better may find it fascinating.

"The Art of Fielding" isn't just a great baseball story, it's a literary novel, full of allusions and symbols. If it were part of the course syllabus for a survey of American lit, it would be the last book of the semester, in which the threads of Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau would all be tied together. Not to mention Homer and T. S. Eliot.

I want to tease this novel rather than to tell you specifically what's in it. Is it also, in addition to the things I've mentioned, a love story? You bet. There are three love stories. One is your standard boy meets girl. One is guy meets guy. This one may land the book on a lot of LGBT year-end lists this year. But probably the most central love story is a platonic one: that of a friendship between two young men. show less

It's been a long time since a novel engrossed me so much that I stayed up late into the night to finish it. And on a weekday, too. But that was the case with The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

The Art of Fielding has gotten a lot of love since its publication last year; some are asking whether it is the next great American novel. My opinion? It has many of the ingredients to endure in literature, and incorporates ideals and experiences ubiquitous in American culture: baseball, college life, striving for perfection, utter failure, friendship, courtship. Whether these elements will prove to be enough, only time will tell.

The novel focuses on the lives of five individuals at the fictional Westish College in Wisconsin: Henry Skrimshander, show more a scrawny but intensely gifted shortstop; Mike Schwartz, a born leader and coach who becomes Henry's mentor and best friend; Owen Dunne, Henry's brilliant and organized roommate; Guert Affenlight, the college president struggling with his feelings for a student; and Pella Affenlight, the president's daughter, running away from a constricting marriage and hoping to start afresh at her father's beloved institution.

Henry, Mike, and Owen all play for the Westish baseball team. Mike, a year ahead of the other two, discovers Henry at a summer league game before his sophomore year at Westish. When he finds out that Henry has no plans to play college ball (his scrawny build has everyone assuming he's a worthless player), he immediately recruits him to Westish where he is trying to build up the athletic programs without scholarships, fancy amenities, or any sort of successful record. Henry's overjoyed at the chance to continue playing baseball. By his junior season, Henry, following Mike's advice, has become stronger not only defensively, but offensively as well. He gets hits in every game and has not once, in the two and a half years he's played at Westish, made a fielding error. He's poised to tie and then break his idol, Aparicio Rodriguez's record of errorless games.

Henry strives for perfection. And he achieves it for a long time, which makes the sting of failure even stronger when it comes. Schwartz, too, wants perfection. He puts pressure on himself to be everything to everybody who needs him, tests his own limits and then breaks them, and then does it all over again. When Schwartz comes face to face with his own failure, he bitterly resents Henry's successes. Pella has been down the road to success and back again and tries to convince both Henry and Schwartz that perfection is not only unattainable, it's overrated.

The strongest aspect of The Art of Fielding is definitely the characters. Henry alone is a masterpiece of a literary character. His journey throughout the novel - a journey that is emotional, physical, and psychological - is alternately heart-warming and heart-wrenching. His robotic tenacity, his gifted fielding, his laughable naivety, his complex mental block - all characteristics that Henry puts on then painfully sheds as he struggles to find himself. Schwartz is a character the reader gets to know slowly. In the beginning, we see Schwartz mostly through Henry's eyes and, like Henry, admire his strong and competent personality, his almost god-like aura. As the story progresses, we see more and more of his flaws - by the end of the novel, he's just an ordinary guy.

Now that I think about it, both Henry and Schwartz start out with a flies-in-the-eyes view of the other. Schwartz's tunnel vision centers around Henry's amazing fielding talents, and Henry idolizes Schwartz for his boldness and strength. Not only does each character work to achieve perfection in himself, but each also blindly creates that perfection in the other. Looking at it that way, the fall out is inevitable.

Owen is an interesting character. He's witty - his one-liners often providing comic relief throughout the story. At the same time, he's very guarded, emotionally. As readers, I don't think we get a true picture of the real Owen until the final game toward the end of the novel. Until then, he hides his emotions behind a wall of charm and wit - the kind of guy you love to hang out with, but you're never quite sure where you stand with him.

Another interesting aspect of Harbach's book is the way he shamelessly blends real life and fiction. To be honest, I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. For example, Harbach takes a real life, very famous writer, Herman Melville, and places him in a fictional place, Westish College, giving a moving speech, no less. What's more, Harbach actually quotes from the fake speech by the real writer given at the fake college. Can he do that? Attribute a fake quotation to a real person within a fictional story? One can argue that in the world of the novel, Melville did write that speech, but Harbach makes the world of the novel so resemble the real world that things get a little confusing. But maybe that's part of the magic. Harbach has created a world within his novel that's relatable, but still unfamiliar enough that we want to pay attention. We know about baseball legends, but we don't know Aparicio Rodriguez. We know small, private liberal colleges (at least I do, seeing as how I went to one), but we don't know Westish College.

The Art of Fielding is an impressive novel, made even more so by the fact that it is Harbach's first. I recommend it without reservation. show less