Book Review The Art of Fielding

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I don't get it. So many people, mostly critics, loved this book so I was primed to go further with it than most books. It was on so many people's Best Of lists and was the Great White Hope for publishing. A big All American Novel about life and baseball. Awesome. Maybe not. About three quarters of the way into the book, the plot for me just dragged. It swerved into so much angst for all the characters, it felt like way too much navel gazing in such a tiny little world. College and baseball. All these life-shattering breakdowns were happening to lives that hadn't happened yet. And the one mature character in the book was behaving like a (very stupid) college kid.

These characters are people I simply don't recognize. They seem to come in two molds: extremely detached from their plight or so extremely wrapped up in it that they rage against it with all their might. Not one of them seemed real to me. They seemed like very well written literary characters.

That being said, I really enjoyed the first two-thirds of the book. Mr. Harbach is a very, very good writer and his plot might be incredible. I say that because I'm not a fan of baseball and so many people just love this book that obviously I could just be missing the point.





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