Book Review: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Title: The Art of Fielding
Author: Chad Harbach
Enjoyment Rating: 9/10
Referral: One of those buzzy books of the season-- not sure where I heard of it first
Source: Audible for iPhone
Books I've read this year: 157

The Art of Fielding is a book about baseball. More specifically, it's a book about Division 3 college baseball. It's the kind of baseball that, as Harbach says in the book, people end up watching late at night when they turn on ESPN 2 in hopes of seeing reruns of baseball or billiards. In other words, it could be a snoozer of a topic. Except that in Harbach's hands, the story works, even for someone who doesn't know or care a single little bitty bit about baseball.  The 528-page book essentially covers one baseball season of the Westish Whalers, a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. It centers on shortstop Henry Skrimshander, the best player Westish has ever seen, on the cusp of breaking the NCAA record for error-free games. Skrimshander's roommate, Owen, and mentor, Schwartz, make up two of the five central characters, as do Guert and Pella Affenlight, father and daughter, college president and high school dropout, who are dating Owen and Schwartz, respectively.

A couple of things really, really surprised me about The Art of Fielding. The first is that the author, Chad Harbach, wrote such a straightforward, almost classical novel. Harbach, the editor of the journal n + 1, seems to take lots of risks with his journal which spotlights politics, literature, culture, and art, among other things. I would have expected something more postmodern out of Harbach, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the novel is not dead, at least not here.

The other big surprise is that the reviews on Amazon are so polarizing, which I generally think is a sign of a book with serious potential. Some people say it's the worst book they ever read, others adore it. It's true that the book could have been edited by about 100 pages without losing any of the story, but I loved the way that Harbach sometimes took his time with language or spent a lot of time on someone's thoughts. It helped me see ways that I could flesh out my current writing project to make it richer. I've already pressed it on Eddie and my dad is getting a copy for Christmas. I know, it is Christmas, but if you hurry, you can order a Kindle copy for the baseball lover or the reader in your life.