You might have read something about Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding, when it was released earlier this fall. If you don't remember what it was about, then maybe you recall how much the young author was paid for it. Publishers don't dole out such high advances these days, and who's to say if it's worth the reported $665,000 payday. It's a compelling read, at any rate, one of the year's most memorable, and the best campus novel we've read in a while.
Set on the campus of a small midwestern college, the story follows several members of the school's baseball team and branches out from there, touching on the lives of those who come into contact with these players, both seasoned and new, talented and striving, destined for greatness and fated for worse. The star is a hot-shot rookie, Henry Skrimshander, an infield prodigy who is nearly unaware of just how good he is. The team captain and veteran catcher, Mike Schwartz, takes the freshman under his wing, shows him the ropes and prepares him for the attention he's about to receive. One uncharacteristically sloppy play turns Henry's world upside down and ripples through the network of friends, lovers and teammates.
What Harbach captures best of all is the emotions of college life, the freedom and responsibility and temptation, the exhilaration that comes from becoming your own person, seeing yourself in the reflection of people you only just met but who make up your entire world.
And while there are some great baseball scenes, Harbach is also adept at portraying the pursuit of knowledge, even making it entertaining, never too heavy. One section grabbed our attention, a great description about writing by Guert Affenlight, the college president, pondering his early literary life:
He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book's very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.
It makes you think about what it takes to construct a big-hearted epic like The Art of Fielding, peopled with great conflicted characters, rolled out with the kind of ease that makes you take to the bed or barcalounger, soaking it up for hours. Take it for your own or give it to a fan of Jonathan Franzen or John Irving, or anyone who's entering, attending or leaving college. It's an early favorite and one of our current Turnrow 20 titles.
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