First is his dorm-mate Owen, a brilliant, openly gay teammate whose effortless and near-messianic charisma feels like a nod to John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” particularly as Harbach’s sprawling yet intimately drawn story recalls Irving’s immersive sense of detail. He’s a repetitive motion machine full of workouts and rituals custom-built by his teammate and flawed mentor Mike Schwartz, determined to become bigger, stronger and more obsessed with the game than anyone else.īefore too many sports clichés can take root, the novel brushes aside Henry’s rise from lanky prodigy to big league prospect and instead shares focus on those surrounding his development. Henry is introduced as a gifted yet socially awkward shortstop and disciple of a handbook for middle infielders that gives the book its name, and his pursuit of perfection leaves him as something of a cipher in the early going.
The issue for Henry, and the characters around him, is how recovery from these errors on and off the field gives shape to people’s lives. That’s because instead of focusing on runs and hits, Harbach is most concerned with errors, that cruel statistic line unique to baseball that no one, not even an athlete touched by natural greatness, can ever eliminate. With that in mind, it was hard to imagine Chad Harbach’s debut novel about a scrappy college baseball team offering much new to say about the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd or anything resembling Updike’s “lyric little bandbox” in 2011.Īnd yet, that’s what Harbach has done with “The Art of Fielding.” Centering on an imaginary northern Wisconsin private school and its baseball star-in-the-making Henry Skrimshander, Harbach sidesteps much of the familiar mythmaking that can go along with spinning the American pastime into literature and instead delivers a rich, warmly human story that resonates even if you have no idea what a 6-4-3 double play looks like. Touched on by a library’s worth of authors including John Updike, Stephen King and Don DeLillo, there’s something about the game’s deliberate pace, individual focus and enduring simplicity that seems irresistible to novelists. In terms of conjuring a shorthand for a certain American innocence, there are few delivery systems quite so direct as baseball.
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