The Art of Field­ing / cover by Keith Hayes

By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From Decem­ber 5, 2011
A review I wrote for the site Reader Unboxed.

The Art of Field­ing, by Chad Harbach

Deep down, he thought, we all believe we’re God. We secretly believe that the out­come of the game depends on us, even when we’re only watching—on the way we breathe in, the way we breathe out, the T-shirt we wear, whether we close our eyes as the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand.

The Art of Field­ing has no base­ball imagery on its cover. That’s important.

Keith Gessen, long­time asso­ciate of the novel’s author Chad Har­bach, has writ­ten about designer  Keith Hayes’ search for the right cover treat­ment. The book is, as Robyn Creswell wrote in the Paris Review, “a book about base­ball in the same way that Moby-Dick is a book about whaling—it is and it isn’t.”

That’s a small red har­poon you see under the title. Melville, and scholarship’s love affair with him, loom over many parts of the book. At least one heart is, even­tu­ally, com­pletely skew­ered in the con­tem­po­rary foam of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, insti­tu­tional hubris, and a roman­tic fast­ball slop­pily fielded.

There is some radi­ant writ­ing about base­ball from time to time in these 529 pages.

The coach reached into his bucket, plucked out a ball, and showed it to the short­stop, who nod­ded and dropped into a shal­low crouch, his hands poised just above the dirt. The kid glided in front of the first grounder, accepted the ball into his glove with a lazy grace, piv­oted, and threw to first. Though his motion was lan­guid, the ball seemed to explode off his fin­ger­tips, to gather speed as it crossed the dia­mond. It smacked the pocket of the first baseman’s glove with the sound of a gun going off. The coach hit another, a bit harder: same easy grace, same gun­shot report.

This is your first look at Henry Skrimshan­der. He is a near-magical prodigy on the dia­mond spot­ted by Mike Schwartz, an entre­pre­neur­ial catcher who lures the inar­tic­u­late young phe­nom to a small Mid­west­ern col­lege, West­ish, home of the Harpooners.

What fol­lows makes it hard to say whether Har­bach has made all the world a field of dreams or vice-versa. With deservedly praised dex­ter­ity, Har­bach walks all his players–some of whom have noth­ing to do with baseball—around the bases of events and rela­tion­ships fully as depen­dent on a cam­pus set­ting as they are on their prox­im­ity to West­ish Field.

The “fresh­per­son” Henry, who is trans­formed into a national-championship mar­tyr, func­tions from a pris­tine naïveté that makes him a mag­net to the majors’ scouts and eas­ily the book’s most haunt­ing char­ac­ter. As soon as Mike, his impos­si­bly empow­ered under­grad­u­ate men­tor, is required to field more than he can han­dle in his own sleep­less sphere, Henry is adrift in dirty, shal­low waters.

If you were Henry and you needed Mike you were sim­ply screwed. There were no words for that, no cer­e­mony that would guar­an­tee your future. Every day was just that: a day, a blank, a noth­ing, in which you had to invent your­self and your friend­ship from scratch. The weight of every­thing you’d ever done was nothing.

Henry serves the author and read­ers as a land­mark study of the nat­ural artist/athlete, a vic­tim of youth­ful obses­sion and adult con­ve­nience. The Art of Field­ing is worth read­ing for this char­ac­ter alone,  and the deliv­ery through him of the book’s most explicit observation:

A soul isn’t some­thing a per­son is born with but some­thing that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.

 

To read the full review, jump over to Reader Unboxed.

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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