Book: The Art of Fielding

Why does Goodreads not do half stars? This was a solid three and a half stars, verging on four, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. For my purposes on this blog it's a B either way. I loved all the characters, I despised all the characters, I rooted for them, I rooted against them. Though the Moby Dick allusions and references made more sense due to my reading of Moby Dick earlier this year, the novel is also clearly no Moby Dick, and repeatedly touching it only highlights the gap in profundity between the two. Baseball still can be--maybe the only sport that can be--mythic, but most of the mythological elements here are too self-consciously literary to have the full impact. In other words, though it's an ode to baseball and ballplayers, I'm not sure this is a book many ballplayers would actually love. Though what do I know?

Harbach handles all four of his "focus" characters well, though he struggles more with Pella, and I wonder if it was the character that challenged him or the mere development of a female character. At the very least he tries to give everyone depth, demons, and dignity, and I think he's overall successful. I wish we had gotten into Owen's head, but he remains somehow ineffable and unknowable, which is how everyone else saw him as well. (Another literary reference perhaps? Is our Owen here a nod to Owen Meany of John Irving's novel?) Still, Henry and Schwartz . . . these are characters to know and to love, despite and because of their many shortcomings. 

I'm not sure why it took me so long to finish--I feel like I've been reading two or three pages at a time forever--because until the end I was continuously engaged and entertained. The final chapters of the book, however, seem ill-befitting, a wrap up too tidy and too deliberately novelistic (is that even a word) to work for me. The four protagonists went from being fleshed out figures to being characters in a novel in search of a tidy ending. It was disappointing and not quite authentic to me.

Still, on the whole, I enjoyed it, and if this is what Harbach can do with his first novel, I'm interested to see what comes next. 

Grade: B