It made bundles of year-end top 10 lists, cinching No. 1 at the New York Times. Its sleeve is festooned in drooly hosannas from big-shot authors. It’s more than 500 pages long. That all noted, it had better be good.
Chad Harbach’s debut novel “The Art of Fielding” is good, very good. It’s about life, baseball and literature, in that order, and even someone like me, indifferent to deeds on the diamond — to, well, the art of fielding —will glean riches from this sprawling book.
Harbach’s a firm traditionalist, not unlike his peer (and fan) Jonathan Franzen (who’s the superior writer). He finds grace in an implacably linear narrative form and stubbornly plain language — a great writer, he’s no poet — and it suits his unvarnished story about a group of college ball players, their loves (books, girls — and men), ambitions on the field and off, family, friendship and, yes, Herman Melville.
It’s not flawless. Things move in a leisurely fashion and sometimes you wonder if the amount of pages dedicated to a scene is really commensurate with its importance. A few parts are flabby. Characters have distractingly knobby surnames — Skrimshander, Starblind, Affenlight, Loondorf, Suitcase — that are perhaps meant to be comic but are more like groaners.
Harbach’s triumph is how he seamlessly weaves the messy private lives of his likable young characters — including that of a superlative shortstop who seems to be losing his magic touch — with breath-holding drama on the field, and it’s consistently bracing. The book oozes the love of the game without fetishizing it. Even I found myself rooting for the home team (the Harpooners, a la “Moby Dick”).
“The Art of Fielding” is a first book that feels like a fifth book. It’s full of wisdom. Save for the college president, who I could see played by an older George Clooney, the story is about youth and figuring out who you are and what you’re going to do. These kids don’t know, but neither for that matter does the president. Life’s a game on and off the field — the book almost necessarily stoops to that cliché. But it works in a tale like this, suggesting that we work our hearts out practicing the game, if never mastering it.
