The Art of Fielding

The Art of Fielding is the newest heavyweight contender for Great American novel of the world. It arrives on a garlanded float of its own mythology (there’s a companion book detailing the struggles to get it published) and has garnered countless praise from its obvious go-to influences like Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney as well as Orange Prize for Fiction winner Tea Obreht. So, now we’ve acknowledged that all signs point to everyone being destined to fall in love with this book, let’s just spoil it for you and say… you are destined to fall in love with this book.

Half a review spent talking about the hype behind the book and nothing mentioned of its plot? Well, let’s just say it’s not about baseball, though baseball figures a lot.

Set at Westish College, following the fortunes of one generation of baseball  players, who know that at the end of their college experience, they will go on to careers and sports will be resigned to something they ‘once did.’ Henry Skrimshander is the preternaturally gifted fielder who could go on to bigger and better things and is swept away to Westish by the older, angrier Mike Schwartz, whose brutal obsessive training plan may well be the death of them both. Skrimshander is going to resurrect an ailing baseball team, and he does until a throw to first base brings about not only his downfall but that of his roommate Owen.

That’s all you need to know for the moment.

It’s got that expansive boundlessness of a great American novel. It’s written with verve and electricity, with literary pretensions (a statue of Herman Melville looms large on the campus) and the baseball scenes are accessible and written with the sensibilities of someone in love with the sport. The friendships and affairs are written with plenty of empathy for characters thrown in at the deep-end of their educational life. Simply put, this is an expansive and brilliantly written novel.