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The Art of Fielding: A Novel, by Chad Harbach
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At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league until a routine throw goes disastrously off course. In the aftermath of his error, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.
As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, "The Art of Fielding is mere baseball fiction the way Moby Dick is just a fish story" (Nicholas Dawidoff). It is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.
- Sales Rank: #20126 in Books
- Brand: PowerbookMedic
- Published on: 2012-05-01
- Released on: 2012-05-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.38" h x 1.38" w x 5.50" l, 1.04 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 544 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Though The Art of Fielding is his fiction debut, Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist. He exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative, and in some 500 pages, there's rarely a word that feels out of place. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach's concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships--between friends, family, and lovers--and the unpredictable forces that complicate them. There's an unintended affair, a post-graduate plan derailed by rejection letters, a marriage dissolved by honesty, and at the center of the book, the single baseball error that sets all of these events into motion. The Art of Fielding is somehow both confident and intimate, simple yet deeply moving. Harbach has penned one of the year's finest works of fiction.--Kevin Nguyen
Review
"Chad Harbach has hit a game-ender with The Art of Fielding. It's pure fun, easy to read, as if the other Fielding had a hand in it--as if Tom Jones were about baseball and college life."―John Irving
"An intricate, poised, tingling debut. Harbach's muscular prose breathes new life into the American past-time, recasts the personal worlds that orbit around it, and leaves you longing, lingering, and a baseball convert long after the last page."―Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife
"The Novel of the Month Season Year.... Riveting...[The Art of Fielding] emerges fully formed, a world unto itself. Harbach writes with a tender, egoless virtuosity...There's just something so easy and riveting about the way this book's layers unfold; not since Lonesome Dove have I been so sorry to let a group of characters go."―Andres Corsello, GQ
"One of those rare novels - like Michael Chabon's Mysteries of Pittsburgh or John Irving's The World According to Garp - that seems to appear out of nowhere, and then dazzles and bewitches and inspires, until you nearly lose your breath from the enjoyment and satisfaction, as well as the unexpected news-blast that the novel is very much alive and well."―James Patterson
"Spectacular! The Art of Fielding is a wise, warm-hearted, self-assured, and fiercely readable debut, which heralds the coming of a young American writer to watch....You won't want this book to end."―Jonathan Evison
"When the best shortstop alive sounds believably like a Tibetan lama, and when a thrown ball striking a shovel head at dawn leaves your own head ringing with certainty that truth and friendship have triumphed, you know you're in the hands of a writer you can trust."―David James Duncan
"Not being a huge fan of the national pastime, I found it easy to resist the urge to pick up this novel, but once I did I gave myself over completely and scarcely paused for meals. Like all successful works of literature The Art of Fielding is an autonomous universe, much like the one we inhabit although somehow more vivid."―Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and How It Ended
"Beautifully made, surpassingly human, and quietly subversive, The Art of Fielding restores one's faith in the national pastime--i.e., reading and writing novels."―Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision
About the Author
Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin and was educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He is a cofounder and coeditor of n+1.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An Elegantly Written Mess
By Jeffrey Penn May
Chad Harbach writes elegant prose in The Art of Fielding, and there are moments when his prose matches his insight and the writing becomes almost incandescent, the stuff of great literature. Unfortunately, the beautiful parts taken together sum up to a melodramatic whiny mess.
Harbach writes so well, constructs such well-crafted sentences that it seems he can’t control the impulse to add unnecessary narrative. I often got the feeling that he inserted characters and descriptions as an afterthought, because he suddenly remembered them from his own college experiences at Harvard or University of Virginia. He can’t help but think they must have some significance. Why does the dog appear near the end? The cheerleaders? Why mention the “summer of record heat” on page 510? We’ve gotten through the entire novel without any sense of record heat other than perhaps some sweating here and there, mostly while playing baseball.
For the most part, the characters in The Art of Fielding come off as spoiled whining sniveling and privileged. Therefore, they are supremely frustrating. They almost make it understandable why a bully would want to punch them in the face. Anyone who has worked with emotionally troubled teenagers knows that such work takes almost superhuman patience, understanding, and an unrelenting belief that they will eventually grow into productive adults. And these characters are adults, or at least they are college students.
They seem to have an overriding sense that their college campus is safe, and that they are too emotionally crippled to survive outside it. This theme stretched out over 500 pages elicits disdain. Why should we endure the complaints of those who are becoming only slightly aware of how good they have it, turning down offers as if they are too emotionally overwrought to consider how great the offer is, then coming back to accept or reject based on their current emotional state. How nice. Real life seldom is as forgiving as this safe college campus with mousey administrators, lovely university president, and quaint tradition. To an outsider, this conjured up emotional angst is pretentious. It’s the angst of the privileged, those who don’t have to pay for college because of nepotism, traditions, mysterious talent, and who take it all for granted, and succumb to hiding from the real world by deciding never to leave their safe place.
The central character is not Henry the baseball player, whose odd character shifts mirror the vagueness of his favorite book, The Art of Fielding. It is Guert Affenlight, the 60 something year old university president and Melville, Moby Dick scholar whose love situation implicates the others and pastes them all together. Harbach included fascinating background information about Melville and cute literary jokes and sexual puns. Go Harpooners! But for what purpose? Are we supposed to conclude that the academic paper Sperm-Squeezers motivates and inspires the students of this small cozy Lake Michigan college?
An interesting question could be, what makes someone who has been heterosexual suddenly turn homosexual in his sixties? While the answer might have seemingly obvious answers, maybe latent homosexuality given his obsession with the sexual inconsistencies in studying Melville, so much more could be explored here, in rich complexity, but unfortunately it isn’t. Instead what we get is a blubbering Affenlight, whose “love” for “a bright young boy” merely sounds like any other old fool in love, whether male or female, or in-between, and maybe that is the point, but surely it could be made without subjecting the reader to such an overabundance of self-absorbed superficial pathetic navel gazing. Maybe that’s the way Harbach imagines academics in their sixties, or that’s what he has observed, but recording what one observes or imagines does not always make for good literature.
Affenlight’s wallowing reminded me of an incident in my undergraduate days when I was accosted by a classmate I barely knew while we were headed to the restroom. Both of us apparently were in an equal state of urgency. I had to use the urinal and he the stall. From behind the stall door, he launched into a soliloquy professing his love for someone he apparently thought I knew. He continued nonstop as I tried to hurry, alarmed that our finishing might coincide, and I would be stuck with his effusion for who knew how long. Fortunately I finished first, gave him a sincere “good luck,” and fled before he could emerge from his stall. I never doubted the guy’s love, but his expression of it was an unpleasant dump needing a good flush.
Harbach suggests that the stereotypical bad administrators who must be concerned with image and, gasp, money, would view Affenlight’s dalliance with a “gleam” in their eyes if the bright boy Owen was a girl. “What kind of conversation would they be having if Owen were a girl?” (The mention that Owen was of a different race is so incidental that it has the feeling of being tossed in the mix merely in order to “cover all the bases.”) Maybe Harbach is thinking that he’s adding some sense of equality or equivalency to the gay perspective. But Affenlight’s blathering love for Owen only comes across as pathetic, regardless of gender. The students’ outrage at the university officials over Affenlight seems immature. Harbach tries mightily to give meaning where there appears to be none, at least from the characters perspective, which seems to be a pretentious desire for it all to mean something, to be dramatic, in the way only the most self-absorbed college students can be. Chapter endings ooze false drama.
Given Affenlight’s unlikable character, the students’ reverence for him played out across several chapters near the end becomes all the more ludicrous. Their motivations seem wholly insufficient to justify their actions. What influence does Affenlight have over these characters other than the normal teacher-student power imbalance, which is hardly mentioned? Why would the “brilliant young boy” Owen even consider a liaison with Affenlight? Was it just to get his social causes accepted on campus and through the administrative red tape? There is no indication of Owen being manipulative. In fact, quite the opposite, apparently Owen, unbelievably, loved Affenlight.
Harbach, perhaps in self-parody, might be admitting his own blubbering, evoking Melville’s coined word “snivelization.” Or perhaps it is self-loathing brought upon by others unfairly and meanly heaping hate upon him as he struggled to find his own sexuality. This review can be accused of doing the same thing, which is unfair to both of us. Harbach might have intended to normalize gay life, which is a noble goal. We should never treat another human being cruelly because of who they love. But in this novel, the normal homosexuality is now on equal footing with unpleasant sniveling, a stereotypical view of gay life, which then risks the opposite of the purported intent.
Would changing any of the sexes around make a difference? Probably not. A more pressing question might be, what advantage does the old university president have over the young student, regardless of gender. What is love in these circumstances? If Harbach even tried to address these questions, it’s not evident. No serious examination or “probing.” Who wants to normalize older men or women having sex with near children? (Nabokov obviously explored this.) The Art of Fielding doesn’t seem as if it is up to examining these issues. We deserve a more insightful treatment than Affenlight’s snivelization and the students’ inexplicable reverence for him.
If you have managed to read this entire review, welcoming its end, you might be thinking that I’m just some frustrated old guy who has failed as a writer himself and who shows nothing but envy for Harbach’s superior talent, and partly you would be correct. My work, were I a Harvard grad, would in all likelihood be viewed differently. Too bad I didn’t go to Harvard.
For me, The Art of Fielding was a successful novel because the local writing was often stunning, and it prompted this response. Few novels can elicit this sort of conflicted, oxymoronic, or simply moronic, contortion and frustration at what could have been. I almost resisted posting this review but thought I should at least have a fraction of Harbach’s courage, laying it out there, open for ridicule.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Harbach is rounding third. He's coming home. He scores.
By Peter G. Pollak
Jonathan Franzen is quoted on the dust jacket of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding as saying “First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom.” High praise from other writers can be found on the book’s Amazon page. I had to give the book five stars even though I would have liked to deduct half a star for reasons that I’ll explain below.
While reading The Art of Fielding, I kept trying to find the right word to describe the genre Harbach has invaded. Unable to do so, I’ll simply cite the league that he’s trying out for stars the likes of John Irving and Michael Chabon.
Fielding is built around five characters: Schwartz, a parentless Jew from Chicago, Henry, the presumed protagonist––a kid from nowhere who lives to play baseball, Owen, his gay roommate who is also on the Westish College baseball team; Gert Affenlight, the college’s president and his daughter Pella.
Each is an twenty-first century archetype in the Jungian sense. Had this book been written forty years ago, Schwartz would have a skinny kid escaping the ghetto by his single-minded devotion to baseball and Henry would have been a Polish or Scandinavian jock from the Midwest who sees the potential in Schwartz and nurtures him to success. But this is now and Schwartz is the super jock who picks Henry up by his pint-sized neck and turns him into a phenom, a likely high draft pick, but also someone who doesn’t recognize that his existence is balanced on the knifeblade of perfection.
Had Harbach just given us Henry’s story, this book would have been a nice debut novel, showing promise but not the gravitas to make it the big leagues. Instead Harbach interjects the other three characters into the story, making this a novel, not about baseball or college, but about coming and being an adult. Let’s start with Owen.
Owen is the one character who doesn’t change from start to end. His nickname is Buddha, which tells you all you need to know about his personality. He’s the most perfect character and also the most disappointing.
Henry’s perfection on the ballfield craters when a wind-aided errant throw hits Owen in the face in the dugout where he was as ususal reading a book rather than paying attention to the game. This error snowballs into personal disaster for Henry. He exhibits the inability to make an ordinary throw a la Steve Sax and Chuck Knoblach, but Owen, whose inattention caused the miscue to unsettle Henry, never steps up to the plate to try to help his roommate overcome his crisis of faith.
Owen also enters into an affair with President Affenlight, an affair that comes to a bad end for Affenlight without influencing Owen in any way. In other words, Buddha is not responsible for what happens around him. Maybe in fiction, but . . .
Affenlight’s daughter Pella plays a more complex role in the story. She arrives on campus, escaping from a bad marriage, takes up with Schwartz, enables Henry during his worst days, and then precipitates a denouement where we readers are happy to see three of the characters have survived the crisis, an ending about which the reader is kept in doubt until the last chapter.
The best books about sports are not about sports per se but about how sports colors the world we live in. Sports often mislead young people into ignoring important questions about who they are and how they plan to manage in a world where the difference between winning and losing can be determined by the direction of the wind.
The Art of Fielding is also about death and souls as Owen reminds us at the end, referring to a lesson that President Affenlight taught him. “You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.” Other than Owen whose soul is timeless, the souls of Schwartz, Henry, Pella and even Affenlight grow stronger in the pages of The Art of Fielding, teaching us that some things are worth the effort, even if they don’t turn out perfect.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
My book of the year
By Geoff Young
This novel has been sitting in my library for quite a long time, unread. I have avoided it because I am not a fan of baseball, and I have a native dislike of writers writing about other writers and/or academics, but The Art of Fielding is an exception, a masterful examination of the human condition. Beautifully written, in the forensic style of Jonathan Franzen, this novel consistently delighted me with its profoundly resonant insight and observation. I guess any novel about the human condition must inevitably focus on dysfunctional personalities and families, and often in other novels I find these damaged people merely tedious and unlikeable, but Harbach has unfolded his story in a way that evokes enormous empathy for his brilliant, flawed and fragile characters Perhaps I should take more of an interest in baseball?
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