In Chad Harbach’s first novel, “The Art of Fielding” (Little, Brown; $25.99), Henry Skrimshander arrives for his first day at Westish College, a “slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan,” with a beat-up copy of a book called “The Art of Fielding” in his pocket. “The Art was the only book he’d brought with him, the only book Henry knew deeply.” This is not a metafictional wink: the book in Henry’s pocket isn’t Harbach’s. Rather, it’s a gathering of numbered koans that form a kind of “The Art of War” for baseball—a guide to action on the field that is, moreover, a guide to being:
Schwartz is quoting Robert Lowell’s description of the face of the Virgin Mary, and perhaps the most unusual feature of this unusually charming début is the easy, unpretentious way it has of joining a love of baseball with a love of literature. The Lowell reference, for example, isn’t incidental: it’s from “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,” a Melvillian poem about death and water and whales and God, and is part of a pattern of Melvillian references that run playfully and purposefully through the novel. The Westish College president has the conspicuous and partly Melvillian name Guert Affenlight. (Guert Gansevoort was Melville’s first cousin.) When Affenlight was an undergraduate at Westish himself, he happened upon a “thin sheaf of yellowed paper, tucked between two brittle magazines in the library’s non-circulating bowels”—a lost lecture, delivered by Melville, at Westish, in 1880. The find leads Westish to rebrand itself in allegiance to that lingering moment. Not for nothing is the team called the Harpooners, even if “this might have seemed like a stretch, not to say a risible act of desperation—to adopt Melville a thousand miles from where he spent his life, ninety years after a visit that lasted a day.”
And yet this so-called “stretch” is essential to the story Harbach is telling—a story about how we become ourselves. The central drama of becoming arises from a wildly errant throw by Henry, which injures a teammate and seems to dissolve Henry’s confidence. He is suddenly incapable of throwing accurately, undermined by paralytic self-consciousness, or, Harbach seems to be arguing, by the onset of adulthood itself. As Pella Affenlight, the president’s daughter and another of the book’s main preoccupations, thinks at one moment, “People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.” The difficulty of measuring the size and the nature of one’s acts and of choosing whom one will be—of trying to maintain and defend those choices or else to reverse them—is at the heart of the struggles that Harbach’s characters confront. The people around Henry—his brusque mentor, Schwartz; a sophisticated gay roommate, Owen; Guert Affenlight; and beautiful, wayward Pella—all grapple with the disease of awakening into self, with the perils of the transition from “thoughtless being” to its opposite.
Meanwhile, the Harpooners—for this is a sports novel!—progress through a baseball season that looks like it could take them all the way to the regional championship and perhaps farther still. Watchers of “Friday Night Lights” will be at home in Harbach’s generously told novel. Like the series, it is full of attractive people who make a dependably clean-uppable mess of things while learning life lessons on the field and off. Like the series, it survives an unlikely plot twist involving the clandestine disposition of a corpse. But there’s also much here to interest readers of the contemporary literary novel, a genre that is clearly a preoccupation of Harbach’s: he is a co-editor of the literary magazine n+1, which, through various symposia in recent years, has been earnestly posing the question What is the state of American fiction?
In an excellent essay on David Foster Wallace, from 2004, Harbach wrote:
One of the pleasures of reading Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding” is to see how Wallace and Franzen got Harbach working. There are sly homages to both writers in the book: a videotape that Schwartz watches to restore “some nameless element of his personality that threatened to slip away” recalls the film cartridge in “Infinite Jest”; where a character in “Freedom” fumbles through a bowel movement for a ring, one here fishes through her vomit for an earring. Most ingenious of all is Guert Affenlight’s family name, the clue to which comes in a connection that Harbach’s essay draws between the luminescent names of families in “The Corrections” and “Infinite Jest”: “Franzen’s selection of his fictional family’s surname (lambert, n.: the centimeter-gramsecond unit of brightness equal to the brightness of a perfectly diffusing surface . . .) must be read either as conscious or unconscious homage to Wallace’s Incandenzas.” Harbach’s Affenlights, a made-up German name, evidently belongs to the same lineage. It comes from Licht Affen (“light-ape”), which is what Einstein, off the boat from Europe and instantly famous here, called the photographers who snapped him everywhere he went.
Such buried connections ask us to associate Harbach’s ambition with that of his literary forebears. But a first novel doesn’t land blurbs from James Patterson and John Irving—as Harbach’s has—if its primary reason for being is to score allusive points. The main order of business here is to entertain, and in this Harbach succeeds. His prose, furthermore, is uncommonly resourceful. A batter dips a foot inside the batter’s box, “as if testing the temperature of a pool.” A man’s heart feels “dangerously full, swollen and tender, like a fruit so ripe it threatens to split its skin.” A moon is “as slender as an eyelash.” The front gate of a house is thrown open and shut with “an angry tambourine jingle.” When a ball is hit, the “clear loud peal cut through the crowd’s noise.” When a man unhooks a woman’s bra, he “rubbed very lightly the twin pink indents where the clasp had pressed into her skin.” Baseballs that end up at the foot of a fence during practice are “a harvest of dirty white fruit.”
Such touches are more than surface felicities. They serve a larger purpose in a story that is, after all, about virtuosity and promise—about a young man whose future is incandescently bright, until he becomes too aware of its fragility. “Perfection was what he was after out there,” Harbach writes. The dream of perfection deferred allows Harbach to tell a story about our national pastime that manages, as well, to be about our historical present—in other words, a story about fallibility. ♦
