It’s been a good year for baseball fiction so far; here are three options for your consideration. A couple rookies, and a grizzled veteran, if you will.
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach — Okay, so this is cheating a bit since this came out last year. I mentioned it previously among my favorite books of 2011. I said that I wasn’t sure if it matched the hype. I stand by that comment, but I’d like to clarify it. The Art of Fielding should not be a disappointing book, but the early blurbs and reviews were so glowing that the expectations for a first novel were just too high. It suffers from common first-novel problems: the pacing of the plot varies wildly, characters and themes are introduced and discarded with no apparent reason, and the prose occasionally gets a bit turgid. But there are these moments, and even whole sections, that work so wonderfully that it’s well worth the time and effort. I hope Harbach’s next book arrives with some more aggressive editing, but either way I’m looking forward to it.
The Might Have Been, by Joseph M. Schuster — This debut novel, on the other hand, seems to have been underhyped. It is an astonishingly well-written and balanced effort. Schuster has mined baseball for all its tragedy and triumph while successfully avoiding writing a novel about baseball. Instead, it remains a novel about a man, about his life, about his relationships. There’s an element here that’s reminiscent of one of my favorite novels, The Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone — something related to male psychology, something about how a man sees himself compared to how he wants others to see him, something about the need for respect and success and the pain of failure. Immensely enjoyable.
Calico Joe, by John Grisham — If you haven’t figured it out yet, John Grisham appears here as the “grizzled veteran” of our trio. I say this with no disrespect — on the contrary, at the point in his writing career where contemporaries would be comfortable churning out formulaic serial novels or simply slapping their names on the covers of books they’ve never even read, Grisham continues not only to offer his legal thrillers but to expand his repertoire with books like Calico Joe or his young adult series, Theodore Boone. I like Grisham’s writing best when he’s outside of his legal wheelhouse, so I knew this was one I couldn’t pass up. We have signed copies of Calico Joe, and the signed copies of the third Theodore Boone novel will be here soon.
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