The Art of Fielding

"Literature could turn you into an asshole... it could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties."
Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

One of the reasons baseball works as a metaphor for life is that baseball contains long stretches of inactivity (some call it boredom), punctuated with brief, spectacular moments that are often tricky to explain.  It's these latter moments that keep us coming back to the ballpark and carrying on through our day-to-day lives.  This presents a problem, however, when trying to describe life in an entertaining way.  Boredom is unforgivable in story-telling and inexplicable moments put the teller on a knife-edge; suspension of disbelief is one thing, but stray too far and people cry "deus ex machina."  This is why the better baseball stories use the game as a device to set events in motion, without being the focus.

Chad Harbach successfully manages this balance through most of his debut novel, The Art of Fielding.  It's appropriate that the team at the center of the action--the Westish College Harpooners--is made up of good-to-great players, most of whom will never play ball again after college; the diamonds they play on are little more than weigh stations.  Fielding chooses to depict the feel of baseball rather than the game itself--mostly depicting the minutiae of the everyday lives of the students and faculty members at Westish. 

Until the end of the book when, like any great ball game, some highly dramatic elements are needed to bring events to their close and, perhaps, give the audience something to remember.  The problem is, as discussed earlier, this doesn't work as well in story-telling.  The revelation of a character's death toward the end of a fraught, fast-paced game (which is described well but is, again, wrong for the medium--constant reminders of the score, outs, men on base, all necessary and part of the fun of the game, bog down the story) seems contrived for the sole purpose of amping up the drama and adding artificial weight to the ending.  In most stories, this wouldn't be such a big deal, except Harbach had been doing very well 'till then. 

For most of Fielding's 500+ pages, Harbach beautifully constructs not just the fictional Westish College, but its Herman Melville-centered mythology as well.  He presents a series of characters--four third-person narrators rotating like a, well, if you know baseball I don't need to say it--that all fit so naturally at Westish it's hard to imagine them anywhere else.  Most of them don't think of baseball much at all, except as the distraction it's always been meant to be.  For a few others, baseball is one mildly significant aspect of their lives  Only one, Henry Skrimshander, views the game as not even the defining aspect of himself, but as his whole life.  This kind of obsession, naturally, lends itself to self-destruction, a fate that Harbach foreshadows early:

"After the game ended, you couldn't carry your game-time emotions out into the world--you'd be put in an asylum if you did--so you went underground and purged them."

The rules and temperaments of baseball don't apply outside the game.  Mike Schwartz--who recruits Henry to Westish and someone for whom baseball is but one spinning plate--is a guy who understands this and though the demands he puts on himself are not without their own toll, his basic hardiness keeps him rolling on.  Poor, unprepared Henry on the other hand is, for reasons not explored as thoroughly as they might be (at 500+ pages, something has to give), unable to grasp this.  He functions in the non-baseball world well enough, but only because it's a bridge from game to game and season to season.  Thus, when it's mysteriously taken from him, he collapses into himself, unable to recognize or want help.  Then, when he's unexpectedly granted his dream of going pro, he opts to abandon it and to remain with at Westish, where all is familiar and his dream can be safely that.  Henry's life is at its best when it's nothing but the long moments of inactivity punctuated by the vanishing sublime. 

The trouble is, Henry takes a while to get there.  As though running out of steam while rounding third, Harbach has trouble balancing the half-dozen subplots of Fielding.  These subplots are all mostly good, but are clearly in need of one another, sometimes having trouble moving forward under their own power.  When Henry disappears from his team and his friends, the suspense of where he's run off to is riveting, but I couldn't help but think that the mini-mystery was good only while it remained a mystery--that we'd find him and the answer would underwhelm.  Sure enough, Henry's been off, being typically quiet Henry, minus the baseball.  True to character, but a bit mundane.  So it goes in the last third of Fielding.  Each of the subplots enraptures at times, but drag at others.

That disappointment has much to do with the fact that Harbach does so well through the first half of Fielding.  And without doing something inorganically (and laughably) explosive, the story was headed toward a kind of petering-out.  These characters that aren't always likable--but are almost always relateable--will carry on afterward (minus one).  There are no big revelations and no one has all the answers at the end.  Some characters have excelled and are better people for their struggles while others will spend a bit longer in their respective ruts--smarter but with their brightest moments behind them.  Not even Westish College athletics, having succeeded beyond anyone's most unrealistic hopes, can be sure what happens next.

But that's the ebb and flow of baseball.  And isn't good baseball always more about the journey than the final score? 

Grade: B