As y’all recall from our discussion of
The Road, I took some of the Landmarks of Modren Littra-chore with me on my recent TDY assignment. One of these was Chad Harbach’s
The Art of Fielding. It was hilariously bad, but I did learn one thing: Why people still shell out the shekels to go to Harvard. Stick with me here:
Henry Skrimshander (really), of Westish College (really), is a magical shortstop who has never made an error. Really, and literally, such that he still plays with his Little League mitt (really), which he calls Zero (really). As in, zero errors, and I’ll stop right there, because a) that’s about as far as I got before hurling the stupid thing across the room, and b) the rest of the part I did read is all supposedly clever callbacks to much better works of actual literature. Specifically Melville, and even more specifically
Moby-Dick.
I dunno if Skrimshander is supposed to be Captain Ahab or the Great White Whale, but as you can see from “Skrimshander” it’s both obvious and desperately forced (“like a throw off a barehand pickup on a great bunt down the third base line,” one should probably write in circumstances like this). The Westish College team is called the “Harpooneers,” despite being in Wisconsin, because Melville once gave a guest lecture there. The college president, who is desperately in love with Henry’s gay mulattto (really, and yes, this was written in 2011) teammate, is a Melville scholar. And since this is
modern Littra-chore, they are of course desperately self-aware — the Melville-scholar college president actually remarks to Skrimshander that he, Skrimshander, is in for the seven hundred seventy-seventh lay, which proves, I guess, that author Chad Harbach got past page 25 when he was required to read
Moby-Dick back in high school.
It’s that kind of book. I stopped with about 400 more pages to go, but
all the allusions are like that — forced, way too cute, and often bizarrely wrong.
Harbach’s bio says he played baseball in high school, but that doesn’t come through in his writing, which reads more like “dork who went to Harvard and got an MFA at University of Virginia spent five minutes googling the game.” For instance:
The Art of Fielding is both the title of Harbach’s book, and the title of a book within a book. It’s Henry’s favorite reading, of course, and it’s filled with zenlike pronouncements on the nature of life and Reality. The in-book version is supposedly written by the greatest shortstop ever, Aparicio Rodriguez. Get it? Luis Aparicio and Alex Rodriguez? Arguably the best-fielding and best-hitting shortstops in baseball history? Except… Rodriguez played third base. He
came up as a shortstop, true, but when he signed that ludicrous deal with the Yankees — where he played the vast majority of his long career — they stuck him at third, so as not to injure the
amoure-propre of Mr. March, Derek Jeter.
I guess even Harbach though “Aparicio Jeter” was too much, to say nothing of “Aparicio Wagner” or “Aparicio Ripken Jr.”
He describes Westish College’s location (from memory, but pretty close) as “nestled in the pocket of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin.” Ummm, that would be
Michigan, dude — ask any Michigander where they’re from in the state, and they’ll immediately hold up their right hand to illustrate. You could argue for Wisconsin, I guess, but nobody who grew up in the Midwest, as Harbach did, would describe Wisconsin that way, especially when Michigan is right next door.
The main action of the book, such as it is, kicks off when Henry makes the first error of his entire life, an errant throw that misses the first baseman and hits the gay mulatto teammate in the face, knocking him out, as he, the gay mulatto teammate, is sitting in the dugout. Except… that’s not physically possible. Not really.
That railing is there for a
reason, and that reason is: So guys sitting in the dugout won’t get killed by hard foul balls ripping down the baselines. Also, if you’ve ever played the game — hell, if you’ve ever
thrown a baseball — contemplate what it would take to huck one off a backhand stop from the hole with sufficient trajectory and velocity to bean a guy who’s sitting on the pine. Honus fucking Wagner didn’t have that kind of arm, and even if he did, he wouldn’t knock a guy out with a throw, because that guy would
fucking move before he got hit.
(In the story, the gay mulatto is
reading a book on the bench — with a little light clipped to his cap brim, no less — which is probably the least believable thing in
The Art of Fielding if we’re being honest, and there’s obviously some
strong competition for that title).
And that’s just the plot. The writing is, if anything, even more ludicrous. Like an aging slugger playing for one last contract, Harbach’s metaphors swing desperately for the fences, but usually end up on the warning track. He spends several sentences, for instance, describing how the college president sits in the stands, all to set up the conceit of the president’s tie dangling like an ice-fishing lure. Which isn’t a bad simile, as far as it goes, except a) it goes on way too long, b) it’s March in Wisconsin, and Harbach notes several times how cold it is, so homeboy would be
wearing a jacket, and c) there’s no point to it, other than the image. No information is conveyed by it. There are no thematic callbacks, no insight into the president’s character. It’s just an image — a clever one, let’s give him that — placed there because he likes the way it sounds.
You can guess how the dialogue reads based on that, can you not? Harbach’s characters don’t converse, they pontificate, with the tiresome pomposity of gone-to-seed grad students. I was a pretty big dork in high school, and even worse in college, but not even I would’ve dropped an allusion to Marcus Aurelius in my dugout chatter, because my teammates would be contractually obligated to beat the shit out of me if I did…
Given all that, it’s a stone cold mystery how this novel got all the hype it did… unless you realize that homeboy went to Harvard. And
that’s why you go to Harvard, gang. The
Wiki entry on
The Art of Fielding is amazing. Seriously, read ’em and weep:
A great deal of publicity focused on the story of the book’s publication, as Harbach worked on the novel, his debut, for ten years, subsequently receiving an advance of more than $650,000 after a bidding war for the publishing rights….
The book was well received, making The New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the ten best books of 2011 from the newspaper. Amazon.com named it one of Best Books for the Month of September 2011 and later named it the Best Book of that year. “The Art of Fielding belongs in the upper echelon of anybody’s league, in this case alongside Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, Scott Lasser’s Battle Creek and W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe”…
In August 2011, it was reported that HBO was in talks to develop the novel into a television drama. Scott Rudin was attached as executive producer, with Harbach to serve as a consulting producer.
In May 2017, it was reported that IMG and Mandalay Sports Media would be adapting the novel into a movie.
Six hundred fifty thousand simoleons. For the first novel of a guy whose only other publishing credits came in the
exquisitely pretentious littra-chore journal he’s co-founder and editor-in-chief of. That he co-founded straight out of grad school.
And that’s just the money. The copy I checked out from the library blares “The National Bestseller!” on the cover, and inside that cover are five pages — I shit you not,
five pages — of accolades. For a fluffy little nothing of a
campus novel masquerading as a baseball book,
Magic Realism division. Which
The Natural and
Shoeless Joe are, too, of course — like me, you’ve probably only seen the movies, but that’s enough (
Shoeless Joe was filmed as
Field of Dreams) — but that’s the weirdest thing: In the hundred or so pages I read, Harbach doesn’t holla back at
those. Henry’s glove — Zero, I still can’t get over that — is pretty obviously the leather analogue to Roy Hobbs’s bat “Wonder Boy” in
The Natural, and of course Henry himself might as well walk around barefoot, but none of that shows up.
Instead it’s all Herman Melville for whatever reason, and can a no-name like Harbach really think he’s written the Great American Novel? Right out of the gate? About a kid named Henry Skrimshander, for fuck’s sake?
I dunno. I strongly suspect he might. After all, it’s a national bestseller, fronted by
five fucking pages of accolades, the really breathless kind that you imagine seeing on later editions of
Dianetics or something. That’s one hell of a trick, really, and one wonders just how many somebodies Harbach has naked pictures of to pull it off. The man must be a networking god, and… there you have it.
That’s why you go to Harvard, y’all.
