Adam Mars-Jones's Blog, page 5
January 28, 2012
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach – review
College baseball is the backdrop to an engrossing if sometimes implausible tale of male bonding
Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding cross-breeds two genres with limited gene pools, the baseball novel and the campus novel, and comes up with a vigorous hybrid, entertaining and engrossing, though almost absurdly high-minded. There are only a few passages of unrelieved sporting technicality ("Rick O'Shea laced a one-hopper to the Amherst third baseman, who set in motion an easy double play") and even these are supported by the emotional narrative.
The story begins and ends with Mike Schwartz, all-round undergraduate athlete and driven man, and Henry Skrimshander, who can do only two things, namely place his catcher's mitt exactly where the ball will arrive off a player's bat and then throw it with great force and accuracy to where it needs to be. He is a natural genius as a shortstop, possessor of something closer to a superpower than a talent. Henry's profound knack isn't integrated into anything much resembling a personality, so he must learn to function socially and emotionally, and also to deepen his game in areas other than his mysterious gift, his ability to respond to a response almost before it has taken place. All of this Mike Schwartz, unresenting Salieri to this unlikely Mozart of the baseball diamond, makes possible by getting Henry accepted at his own college of Westish in north‑eastern Wisconsin.
This sort of relationship between young men once attracted no attention by the intensity of its innocence. The feelings it channelled were the ones that powered not just sporting events but armies and empires. Then the Kinsey report was published, and innocence seemed either self-deception or ruse. The buddy movie has never gone away, though recently renamed the bromance, but it can often seem unsure of itself. Even the simplest attitude is mined with contradictions, as when Homer Simpson, unreflecting homophobe, on being informed by tactful Marge that the local antiques dealer prefers the company of men, replies, "Who doesn't?"
One classic way of making it easier to examine non-sexual closeness between men is to include in the story someone who is unambiguously gay (think of Richard Griffiths as Uncle Monty in Withnail and I), reassuringly of a different species. This seems to be happening in The Art of Fielding when a character introduces himself to Henry with the words, "My name's Owen Dunne. I'll be your gay mulatto roommate." Such generically engineered characters are usually solitaries or else in stable relationships, their sexuality safely earthed. That's how it is with Owen, happily involved with Jason, but then the formula mutates and becomes more challenging.
For one thing, Owen tries out for the baseball team and is accepted. His style is fluid, utterly unmacho, but no less effective for that. Then he breaks up with Jason and becomes involved with the college president Guert Affenlight, across a number of boundaries – race, age and previous orientation, since Affenlight has never before had feelings for a man. Indeed he has a grownup daughter, Pella, who arrives back at Westish at about this point in the plot, after the break-up of an impulsive marriage that derailed her academic career.
These four principals in the story are all young, in their early 20s, but each has been supplied with some paradoxical element cutting across mere youth. Mike Schwartz's body is already letting him down, his knees above all, since his athletic versatility brings with it continuous punishment. Henry, aside from his gift, is like a reclusive little old man. Owen's intellectual precocity and self-protective fogeyish manner age him, while Pella's precocious sense of failure gives her the complex attraction of the older woman. Then there's always her father, 60 but very spry, to act not as a shortstop but as a longstop for those readers unable to identify with puppies, however wounded.
Henry the genius shortstop has links with Roy Hobbs in Bernard Malamud's The Natural (Hobbs calls his bat Wonderboy, just as Henry calls his mitt Zero), but The Art of Fielding has deeper affinities with William Maxwell's wonderful novel The Folded Leaf, published in 1945, at about the last possible moment before Kinsey's report made lack of definition seem like evasion. Maxwell's heroes, Spud and Lymie, have feelings for the same woman, just as Mike Schwartz and Henry both become involved with Pella.
The book's references, though, are mainly to Melville. There's some pretext for this, since Guert Affenlight as a young man discovered the transcript of a historically unlikely lecture given at Westish by Melville in 1880 (he went on to write a book on, guess what, "the homosocial and the homoerotic in nineteenth-century American letters"), but a baseball trophy is not a white whale and Mike Schwartz, stern team captain though he is, bears no resemblance to Ahab. Henry's surname, Skrimshander, suggests scrimshaw, the whittling of whale ivory as practised by sailors, and his team-mate Starblind recalls Melville's Starbuck. Harbach is shrewd enough to withhold a reference where it would seem to be compulsory, when Affenlight the Melville scholar is surprised by the quality of the chowder turned out by the college kitchen.
The Art of Fielding seems to set out to destroy, singlehanded if need be, any idea that college sport is an overfunded and culturally narrow distraction from the real business of education. When Owen says to coach Cox, "I trust you don't object to having a gay man on your team," he replies, "The only thing I object to is Schwartz playing football. It's bad for his knees," which can hardly be the whole truth. There's a Mormon on the team, too, but he seems equally accepting. Crowds at ball games seem to find nothing funny about a player named Quentin Quisp (conceivably Harbach's homage to Queequeg). To paraphrase a remark made at one point by the chairperson of the Committee for Student Affairs, I know Westish is supposed to be a liberal arts college, but can it really be that liberal?
There are so many references to high culture that college baseball comes to resemble some sort of offshoot of Mensa. Mike Schwartz quotes Schiller in a pre-game pep talk. Owen reads Kierkegaard in the dugout. Introduced to Pella, Schwartz correctly identifies her name as that of a city sacked by the Romans in 168BC. Even Henry's point of view dwells on Homer rather than Homer Simpson. All of this would be laughable if it was done with less conviction.
On the book's first page there's an elementary slip in the point of view, with a reference to Mike Schwartz letting "his huge aching back" relax against a chain-link fence. Any creative-writing instructor would point out that Mike may feel the ache but hardly the hugeness, which is information aimed squarely at the reader. Perhaps Harbach has let it stand with the affectionate confidence of a driver who decides, after passing his test, not to respray the scratch in the coachwork that happened the first time he took the wheel.
FictionCollege sportsUS sportsAdam Mars-Jonesguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
January 22, 2011
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham – book review
Nothing makes a novel seem more vulnerable, more naked, than an armour-plating of literary references. If you're constantly referring to landmarks, it doesn't make you look as if you're striding confidently forward – it makes you look lost. In a 20-page section of Michael Cunningham's new novel, By Nightfall, in which the hero Peter Harris, an art dealer, visits a faithful client, there are explicit references to: The Magic Mountain, John Cheever, Death in Venice, Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Hawthorne and Death of a Salesman. As if that was not enough (there is no shortage of allusions here to visual art, but they at least are relevant), there's a further cluster of references to The Great Gatsby, first to Dr TJ Eckleburg (who appears on an advertising hoarding in the book), then Gatsby himself, Daisy Buchanan and even Myrtle Wilson. All well and good – but Gatsby didn't get to be Gatsby by dangling dozens of previous books behind it, like tin cans tied to a tricycle. The scene never escapes from the net of its own allusions, and all the writer's talent goes for nothing.
By Nightfall tells a story of midlife crisis averted, when Peter is sexually tempted by his brother-in-law (young and messed up, with a certain amount of bisexual history). Cunningham is a gay writer who wants, as so many of us do, to achieve a mainstream readership – he succeeded with The Hours – but here he stacks the odds against himself. Gay male readers tend to feel that their lives haven't been squeezed dry by novelists, not just yet, and may resist even a convincing portrait of a heterosexual man. Others may feel cheated when Peter finds he's not quite as straight as he thought.
Continue reading...December 18, 2010
Role Models by John Waters – review
Wanting to be notorious and also well-liked is an oddly forked ambition, but for 40 years now John Waters has been treading his double path. In books such as the new Role Models he gives the paradoxes of his image some fine-tuning. The essay on art collecting has some charmingly brisk advice for the beginner (go to the second show of an artist you like and buy something for about $5,000) and everything on his list of Five Books You Should Read to Lead a Happy Life if Something is Basically the Matter With You is worth knowing. But the real message is: "Bet you didn't think that a film-maker best known for a scene of shit-eating would respond so fully to the drawings of Cy Twombly and the prose of Denton Welch, huh?"
When it comes to interviewing the singer Johnny Mathis, his "polar opposite", the mismatch isn't perhaps as great as Waters thinks. It's hard to feel the contrast as electrifying in a world where Tony Bennett can play Glastonbury. In theory, Waters became interested after seeing Mathis off duty but effortlessly in role ("I never got over seeing Johnny Mathis in the parking lot"), but perhaps the epiphany has been surgically enhanced. Other things in the book that Waters never gets over include the media circus of the Manson trial and a show by minimalist sculptor Richard Tuttle.
Continue reading...November 6, 2010
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary by Don Paterson - review
Shakespeare's Sonnets must be the most uneven work in the entire canon of English literature, slipping from blandness to a jarring intensity, and in Don Paterson's new book they receive a commentary to match. This isn't a conventional edition, though it includes Paterson's preferred version of the text and gives reasons for his choices. Its plan is more subjective: to write about poems that have receded into immortality as if their charge was fresh.
Don Paterson is a working poet (and a remarkable one), which gives a number of his observations unanswerable force. He resists the cryptographic approach exemplified by Helen Vendler, whose analyses of buried patterns he admits to finding seductive as well as exasperating, on the basis that such things aren't planned. Perhaps they can't even be avoided. They're the result of "instinctive decision-making, driven through the local compositional exigencies of the sonnet form".
Continue reading...September 18, 2010
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, edited by Nicholas Shakespeare and Elizabeth Chatwin | Book review
Bruce Chatwin lived by a myth of effortlessness which in some respects worked against him. It was tempting to think that someone so reliant on flair had come to the compound genre – not fiction nor travelogue nor memoir nor anthropological treatise – of his most characteristic works, In Patagonia and The Songlines, with the same unerring instinct that led him, in an antique shop in Ludlow, to zero in on an unimpressive object resembling a walking stick. It turned out to be one of the flagpoles from a doge's barge.
The main service this collection of letters does is to dispel that idea. Chatwin worked hard at his effortlessness, and felt his way over numerous drafts to the hybrid forms that satisfied him. He had joined Sotheby's straight from school in 1959, though he tried to make up for his lack of further education by studying archaeology at Edinburgh in his late 20s; he didn't finish the course there. Colleagues at Sotheby's had no inkling of any literary ambition, one of them saying: "He didn't appear to be able to string two words together on paper." Thanks to Francis Wyndham's intuition in 1972 that he would be an asset to the Sunday Times, then having one of its adventurous phases, he was encouraged to spread his wings journalistically.
Continue reading...June 26, 2010
Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco | Book review
The "Ilustrados" from whom Miguel Syjuco derives his title – the enlightened ones – were Europeanised Filipinos who came home, from 1860 onwards, to prepare for revolution. He himself writes in English and has developed as a writer at such institutions as Columbia University and the University of Adelaide. Many if not most of the narrative mechanisms of this first novel don't actually work, but it's hard to quarrel with the judges who awarded it the Man Asian literary prize. At one point Syjuco describes the white sky over Manila bay as a blank page waiting for its first mark – but anyone who reads Ilustrado is likely to feel that the skyline has been richly inscribed and illuminated.
The plot starts with the death by drowning in New York of a famous writer called Crispin Salvador, a gadfly in exile who can rarely resist provoking the powers that be in his home country. There is a noir tinge to this opening and a scattering of clues. Salvador leaves behind a list of names, but no trace of the manuscript (The Bridges Ablaze) that was supposed to establish his reputation for all time, as well as to settle any outstanding scores.
Continue reading...January 30, 2010
A New Literary History of America Edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors | Book review
This book is described on its cover as "America singing, celebrating itself and becoming altogether different, plural, singular, new". Luckily, the contents don't bear out this frighteningly wholesome agenda. Greil Marcus, the better known of the two editors, specialises in rich and wilful explorations of high and low culture. It's not surprising that a book with him as one of its devisers should contain articles about Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Hank Williams and Irving Berlin, Chaplin, Some Like It Hot and Psycho. More unexpected but equally successful is the inclusion of essays on technology (the Winchester rifle, the linotype machine) and institutions such as Pentecostalism, the Book of the Month Club and Alcoholics Anonymous.
The other editor, Werner Sollors, has written books called Neither Black Nor White Yet Both and Ethnic Modernism. I'm not suggesting that his contribution is entirely concerned with ethnicity, but the book is a striking anthology of racial attitudes. Black anger old-style is expressed by Ishmael Reed in a rant only loosely based on Huckleberry Finn: "Twain exposes... this exotic yearning of those who despise blacks yet wish to imitate them. Who wish to be called 'honey' by them. Who wish to be 'petted' by them. Who wish to burn them, cut out their very entrails and take them home with them. If you can't give us our nigger, they seem to say, we'll make do with Elvis." It's doubtful if this is as effective a challenge to received ideas as Leslie Fiedler's suggestion (in "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey", an essay written in 1948) that the racial dynamics of classic American literature include a strong element of same-sex longing.
Continue reading...November 7, 2009
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey | Book review
Blake Bailey seems to specialise in writing the lives of self-destructive American writers – first Richard Yates, now John Cheever. He may have a full biographical career ahead of him. Cheever breaks the general pattern by virtue of a late recovery after stupendous alcoholic wallowing. He stopped drinking in 1975 and ended his life in a blaze of literary glory. His 1977 novel, Falconer, was hailed as a masterpiece, though previous attempts at long-form fiction had been oddly inconsequential. His collected stories won major prizes and sold exceptionally strongly the next year.
Susan Cheever published a memoir, Home Before Dark, in 1984, only two years after her father's death; this drew on the immense wealth of his journals (more than 4,000 pages, typed and single-spaced) and showed the repetitive agonies behind the sunlit public image. It was bad luck as well as talent that made Cheever an exemplary figure, the bad luck of being so deeply divided.
Continue reading...October 3, 2009
The Infinities by John Banville | Book review
A character in John Banville's new novel is compared to an over-cleaned painting, "brilliant and faded at the same time". That's not a remark that could apply to the book itself, whose brushwork is luminous, but everything in it does have a double texture, intensely realised but also distanced through mischievous planes of refraction. The atmosphere is strong but elusive.
Certainly the book addresses the "infinities" of its title but it also observes the unities of dramatic construction, taking place in an Irish country house on a single summer day. Adam Godley, a brilliant and world-changing mathematician, has had a stroke and lies comatose in the Sky room at the top of the house. His wife, son and daughter wait for his death, with the mixed feelings that attend the end of any great man. The son has a lovely actress wife, the daughter a rather tepid fiancé, and the genteel housekeeper's family used to own the grand house.
Continue reading...Adam Mars-Jones's Blog
- Adam Mars-Jones's profile
- 88 followers
