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. 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 author of Moby-Dick gazes down on Harbach's efforts. A statue of Herman Melville stands at the heart of the Westish college campus. And there is the president's romance-damaged daughter.Īnd because this is an American novel, there is a grand gesture. Thrown in is a college president who becomes gay in his declining years and falls in love with another member of the baseball team. 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. The story itself is set around Westish, a fictional college on the shores of Lake Michigan. 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." There is no sign of the game on either the British or American covers.Īccording 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. 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. 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.
There is no doubt that this is a novel that will appeal to lovers of sport. Audaciously, Harbach himself appears to play on the search for the grail of US literature, the great American novel. Jonathan Franzen, most recent of the literary wunderkinds, is being held up in comparison and is quoted on the back cover. The Art of Fielding arrives here later this month on a wave of hype. It became a Vanity Fair magazine article, which in turn was published at greater length as an ebook. 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.
The narrative of the book about the book - How a Book is Born: The Making of the Art of Fielding - tells a different tale.
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