This one was called The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. It was on your "living room" table in your apartment in Brooklyn, and I had read about it in passing in the New York Times and a bunch of other places. Won a bunch of "best of the year" awards. Whatever. I bought a copy of it and read it.
I should have done more research about the book and the author before actually reading it. Or maybe i should have stopped 15 pages into it. Because the book was pretty bad. The format is pretty standard "Great American Novel" stuff. A partially extraordinary, partially completely ordinary, partially allegorical story about a baseball team at a small liberal arts college and the relationships that develop between the President of the school, his daughter, and members of the baseball team (it's very sexual and everyone gets involved), the book starts off as our hero, Mike Schwartz, is playing summer baseball after his freshman year and sees on the opposing team a young player who is extraordinarily, supremely talented, if shy and undersized. Mike takes this kid (Henry) under his wing, gets him into college, turns him into a star, and then Henry gets a bad case of the jitters and turns into a spiteful ball of nothing. The president of the school (a male) develops a crush on the starting second baseman (another male) of the team, and the president's daughter starts dating mike. Everything gets a little hairy, people die, and at the end all is at a new normal.
This would be pleasant enough to read (and would not necessarily be a "bad" book) if the delivery was there. And it was not. The writer claims to have played baseball in high school, but his grip on the lingo (and indeed the mechanics of the game) is shoddy at best, and is downright abysmal at its worst moments. this wouldn't be an issue if the book used the game less, but the writer uses baseball - playing it, the physical act of the game, the pregame rituals, even the offseason workout schedule - as the moral center of the book, and he does a terrible job describing this. Again, this is also okay - baseball is a beautiful game, perhas the most perfect of all sports - but you have to accurately describe these emotions in order for them to ring true (more on morality in the book later). The "artsy" scenes of the book were baseball scenes, either during pregame training, as a ball was hit by a bat, and they did not even come close to describing the feelings on a baseball field. I have read many of the fiction and nonficton books that use baseball, and with regards to how he describes the game, his may be the worst that I've encountered.
Who cares, right? It's a game. Well it leads to a greater issue in the book, which is the usage of metaphors and the morality of the characters. He tries to use this Moby-Dick metaphor throughout the book (the president of the school was a Melville scholar), and maybe it rings true because I guess they were all searching for their white whale and could face it but didnt uite conquer it, but it is so sloppily and carelessly put on that I truly wonder why he used it in the first place. of course, that little thing about moby-dick may be the most intelligent thing that the writer does, or it may have been serendipity that I came across this occurrence. If that was his desire, then the book used the metaphor well, but as I think about it more, I don't think that was what he was going for. Moby-Dick was featured less than the author of the book, Herman Melville (who was a grade-A weirdo). And in general heavy literary allusions that buttress the entire story can feel more lazy and sycophantic than anything else.
With regards to morality, I hate to compare it to Tolstoy's work, because it is wholly undeserving, but I will anyway. A good book (cf. War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov), certainly discusses morality and the moral issues of their characters, but it is in an organic way that allows the reader to either sympathize with the character OR realize his great moral dillemas without having it spelled out - OR (!) they're not ever spelled out and you have to make your own conclusions as to what motivated someone to do something. Harbach does not do this. He strings the characters along, plotting them through his world, and then suddenly announces what exactly their moral crises are, spoon feeding it to you and making it clear that a character's emotions could not lead to any other action. It is a lazy and unrewarding tactic.
Like the tactic, the story itself was unrewarding. There was no great moral discovery at the end of this book. The characters, at the en of the book, do not feel shiftless and yet you have no sense of their future plans (at all), and you really don't wish to know them. There is nothing at the end of this book. And I guess that's why I disliked it.
