The Art of Fielding: baseball, growing up and the great American novel

The Art of Fielding?s use of baseball continues a tradition of the sport as metaphor for the American dream. Photograph: Image Source/Getty

Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding may be the first debut novel to have another book written about it before it was even published.

Sold to the American publisher Little, Brown for a $665,000 (?431,000) advance, and appearing on the other side of the Atlantic late last year, it is already a sensation. It is the story of Henry Skrimshander, a boy from the Midwest with a talent for catching and throwing a baseball. On the cusp of success, Henry loses his nerve, prey to what is famously and fabulously called "the yips". It draws on the real-life experience of a Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher from the early 1970s, Steve Blass.

The narrative of the book about the book ? How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding ? tells a different tale. Written by Harbach's friend Keith Gessen, it relates Harbach's 10-year struggle to complete the novel and the rejections by agents before its ultimate, extraordinary success. It became a Vanity Fair magazine article, which in turn was published at greater length as an ebook.

So far, so modern. The Art of Fielding arrives here later this month on a wave of hype. The literary hive is buzzing. Hollywood is calling. Jonathan Franzen, most recent of the literary wunderkinds, is being held up in comparison and is quoted on the back cover. Audaciously, Harbach himself appears to play on the search for the grail of US literature, the great American novel.

There is no doubt that this is a novel that will appeal to lovers of sport. The former England cricket captain Mike Atherton last week called it "an outstanding novel about sport", saying: "Any sportsman who has choked will recognise and empathise with Skrimshander's final humiliation." Yet the publishers want more recognition for it than that. Just as Don DeLillo sought to tell the story of the cold war in his 1997 novel Underworld by following a baseball hit out of the park by Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants in 1951, The Art of Fielding is supposed to be about much more than a ballplayer. There is no sign of the game on either the British or American covers.

According to the Vanity Fair story, Michael Pietsch, publisher of Alice Sebold, David Sedaris and David Foster Wallace, told the audience of a books convention in Manhattan: "This is a novel about perfection, about striving, about youth. About those years when your job is to learn everything you can learn and try to understand anything you can understand, to try to study literature and philosophy and figure out who you are, and who you might become."

The story itself is set around Westish, a fictional college on the shores of Lake Michigan. Henry, shy, with a future in a no-mark job, is spotted by an up-by-the-bootstraps Chicago kid who has ruined his body playing sports he'll never excel at and who starts to live through Henry's talent. Thrown in is a college president who becomes gay in his declining years and falls in love with another member of the baseball team. And there is the president's romance-damaged daughter.

And because this is an American novel, there is a grand gesture. A statue of Herman Melville stands at the heart of the Westish college campus. The author of Moby-Dick gazes down on Harbach's efforts. There is a sly wit to this, as if Harbach is saying, don't confuse my book with the real great American novel, all the while continuing to remind us of his astonishing ambition.

The Art of Fielding certainly cements the idea that a powerful new group of writers has emerged in America in the wake of Franzen's success with his novels The Corrections and Freedom. The big beasts of US literature ? Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Roth ? who fought their battles, sometimes physically ("Lost for words again, Norman?" Gore Vidal said after being punched by Mailer) but more usually in intense, convoluted, poetic sentences, are mostly gone now.

Writers such as Franzen have brought in a new style. The highly wrought phrases of the past have given way to stories that run smoothly in front of the eye and which wouldn't have surprised Dickens, looking little further for their depths than in their characters. It is a form of what Zadie Smith, in an essay in the New York Review of Books about another sporting novel ? Joseph O'Neill's Netherland ? referred to as a battle between lyrical realism and the experimental, the struggle between the tradition of Balzac and Flaubert on one side and Kafka and Beckett on the other.

So will The Art of Fielding live up to the enormous expectations being laid on it? Published in Britain on 19 January, it is sensational and utterly gripping. The New York Times talks of "a magical, melancholy story about friendship and coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer". The New Yorker said: "The main order of [Harbach's] business is to entertain" and added, "There's much here to interest readers of the contemporary literary novel, a genre that is clearly a preoccupation of Harbach's."

Whether it is a great American novel is therefore beside the point. It is ? if you subscribe to the idea that, of late, the grail has become a genre. "The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected," was Somerset Maugham's droll view on the search. Harbach seems to be laughing at the urge to write it with the device of that statue of Melville, as if to say its shadow is causing him to harbour the same debilitating sense of ambition that brought Henry Skrimshander so low.

What is certain is that when The Art of Fielding is released here at the end of the month it will be the title most preceded with the phrase, "Have you read?" It's already booked its place on the dinner party bookshelves, among the Murakamis, the McEwans, the Zadie Smiths and the Rushdies. And why not? That's where most authors want and need to be.

And as Gessen revealed in his shorter book, people placed their careers on the line to see this book into print. It is a success in publishing, which is welcome. Harbach has created characters who entrance: vulnerable, beautifully drawn and likable. That should be enough: to be, if not great, superb.

His second novel cemented the 33-year-old's standing as America's literary wunderkind. Set in the near future within an elite tennis academy and a drug rehab centre in Boston, the plot follows the search for a lost art film as well as a conspiracy centred on a group of wheelchair-bound Quebec separatists. The novel, published in 1996, won Foster Wallace plaudits for his comic dialogue and meditations on art, entertainment and addiction. In 1997 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant". His suicide in 2008 sent shockwaves throughout the American literary community.

A celebrated author since the 1960s, many regard Roth's 1997 novel American Pastoral to be his greatest work. Through the use of the author's frequently used alter ego, Nathan Zuckerberg, the novel depicts the life of prosperous Jewish-American businessman Seymore "Swede" Levov, whose privileged existence is derailed by the actions of his daughter during anti-Vietnam protests. Both a reflection on the turmoil of 1960s America and a study of grief and rage, American Pastoral won several literary awards, including the 1998 Pulitzer Prize.

Franzen's third novel, published in 2001, centres on the lives of a Midwestern family, the Lamberts. Its narrative about a traditional American family unit riven with hidden miseries, including the elderly father's descent into the chaos of dementia and Parkinson's disease, shines a light on the discontents of modern American society. Acclaimed upon publication, The Corrections won the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It went on to become one of the decade's bestselling books.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/07/art-of-fielding-baseball-novel

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