Lit Crit Lite A look at some books available at your local public library
by Seth Weidenaar
These characters are caught at the tipping point of their lives and dreams.
C
had Harbach’s new novel The Art of Fielding bears its conundrum in its title. The Art of Fielding sounds like a quaint baseball novel, and it certainly is a baseball novel. But, art is not something readily associated with baseball or with quaint baseball novels; this requires a bit of thought. The greatest fielding baseball players were certainly artful, and with a bit of effort a list of artful fielders can be produced. Perhaps even a list of the most artful plays can be produced. This is a bit of the novel’s conundrum: Is it a baseball story? Or is it a novel that pushes the reader into the stuff of memory? It is certainly both, and then some. The novel excites its great descriptions of playing baseball, and it lulls the reader into emotional recall with many allusions to famous novels,
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great poems, and works of art. The novel also warms the heart with its great tale of friendship, and it also repulses with its depiction of the harsh treatment people can dish out. The novel does all of these things and then some, simply by being a story with five main characters whose lives become intertwined with a few unfortunate events. Henry Skrimshander is a shy, small kid who can play shortstop unflappably. This gift gains the attention of Mike Schwartz, a baseball player at Westish College in Wisconsin. Mike recruits Henry for the Westish baseball team, and then becomes Henry’s mentor and friend. Owen Dunne is Henry’s roommate, and Owen introduces himself with one of the novel’s many memorable lines. Harbach seems to have a knack for producing far-fetched dialog that borders