The Art of Fielding: A Novel

by Chad Harbach

Some of his classmates were going to college to pursue their dreams; others had no dreams, and were getting jobs and drinking beer.

By this point in his life, reading Aparicio no longer really qualified as reading, because he had the book more or less memorized. He could flip to a chapter, any chapter, and the shapes of the short, numbered paragraphs were enough to trigger his memory.

He’d realized as much since arriving at Westish, just as he’d realized there was something wrong with his shoes, his hair, his backpack, and everything else. But he didn’t know quite what it was. The way the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow, he had only one for jeans.

In those three months he’d done nothing more strenuous than washing dishes in the dining hall. He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember more often that life was lived in four dimensions. Maybe they could teach you to build your own dorm furniture or grow your own food. Instead everyone kept talking about the life of the mind—a concept, like many he had recently encountered, that seemed both appealing and beyond his grasp.

“Remember when it was easy to be a man? Now we’re all supposed to look like Captain Abercrombie here. Six-pack abs, three percent body fat. All that crap. Me, I hearken back to a simpler time.” Schwartz patted his thick, sturdy midriff. “A time when a hairy back meant something.” “Profound loneliness?” Starblind offered. “Warmth. Survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children would burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nymphs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now all that’s forgotten. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the next ice age comes, the Schwartzes will be sitting pretty. Real pretty.”

Owen took a battery-powered reading light from his bag, clipped it to the brim of his cap, and opened a book called The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Henry and Rick would have found themselves doing shuttle drills and scrubbing helmets if they’d even thought about reading during a game, but Coach Cox had already stopped punishing Owen for his sins. Owen posed a conundrum where discipline was concerned, because he didn’t seem to care whether he played or not, and when screamed at he would listen and nod with interest, as if gathering data for a paper about apoplexy. He jogged during sprints, walked during jogs, napped in the outfield. Before long Coach Cox stopped screaming. In fact, Owen became his favorite player, the only one he didn’t have to worry about. When practice was filled with miscues, as it usually was, he would whisper mordant remarks to Owen from the corner of his mouth. Owen didn’t want anything from Coach Cox—not a starting job, or a better spot in the batting order, or even any advice—and so Coach Cox could afford to treat him as an equal. Much the same way, perhaps, that a priest appreciates his lone agnostic parishioner, the one who doesn’t want to be saved but keeps showing up for the stained glass and the singing.

As the losses mounted, Coach Cox stood in the third-base coaching box with crossed arms, digging a moat in the dirt with the toe of his cleat and filling it with a steady stream of tobacco juice, as if to protect himself from so much ineptitude.

It was not before my twenty-fifth year, by which time I had returned to my native New York from a four years’ voyage aboard whalers and frigates, having seen much of the world, at least the watery parts, and certain verdant corners deemed uncivil by our Chattywags and Mumbledywumps, that I took up my pen in earnest, and began to live; since then, scarcely a week has gone by when I do not feel myself unfolding within myself.

it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.

He wanted to do what was right, wanted to prepare Westish for the century ahead, but he also wanted to prove to O that he could do those things. A year, two years, three—the normal time horizons of the college bureaucracy didn’t square with his objectives. When it came to impressing someone you thought you might love, a year might as well be forever.

She’d cut herself off from the source of her distress, which happened to be her entire life.

It was part of their routine; Schwartz could call Henry at any time, or vice versa, and the other would answer quickly and casually, ready for whatever, never mentioning the oddness of the hour. Because what was sleep, what was time, what was darkness, compared to the work they had to do?

“His first wife died young, of tuberculosis. Emerson was shattered. Months later, he went to the cemetery, alone, and dug up her grave. Opened the coffin and looked inside, at what was left of this woman he loved. Can you imagine? It must have been terrible. Just a terrible thing to do. But the thing is, Emerson had to do it. He needed to see for himself. To understand death. To make death real. Your dad said that the need to see for yourself, even in the most difficult circumstances, was what educa—” “Ellen was nineteen,” Pella interrupted to say. She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.

“Free? Heavens, no. After a cappella practice I’ll be volunteering down at the soup kitchen while I finish my paper on the theme of revenge in Hamlet. Then my sorority has a mixer with the Alpha Beta Omegas, my bulimia support group is getting together for dessert, and after that I have a date with the captain of the football team.” “I’m the captain of the football team.” There was a long pause. “Oh. Well, in that case. What time can you pick me up?”

The menu itself seemed to be an insult—she didn’t give Mike one.

“I’d just been accepted to Yale—my dad taught at Harvard when I was a kid, so I wanted to be just like him while pretending to be the opposite.

He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.

He’d been dreaming of it all morning. But Whitman! What was he thinking? Reading aloud was already borderline intimate, one voice, two pairs of ears, well-shaped words—you didn’t need to press your luck.

What a strange thing love was! You met an excruciatingly beautiful creature, one who seemed too well formed to have sprung from sperm and egg and that whole imperfect error-prone process—and then you met his mother.

“Owen, look—Walt Whitman. Your favorite.” “Whitman’s not my favorite,” Owen said. “Too gay.” “Oh, stop,” said Genevieve, with a wave of her book-holding arm. Affenlight thought about snatching the book back, but it was way too late. “You used to love Whitman.” “Sure, when I was twelve.” Owen glanced at Affenlight. “Whitman appeals to the newly gay. He’s like a gateway drug.”

So much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.

“I’ve felt worse.” “When?” “Well, never. But I could imagine feeling worse.”

the way he cranked up the charm at certain moments and then basked in the adulation of his audience annoyed her. She knew this was precisely a professor’s job—to build a repertoire of lectures, refine them over time, and perform them as charismatically as possible. To never seem sick of your own voice, for the sake of others. And yet. You could take the same class only so many times.

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error.

throwing around these big little words—love, work, art.

Never too drunk to use whom.

You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard.

All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever. It sounded crazy when you said it like that, but that was what baseball had promised him, what Westish College had promised him, what Schwartzy had promised him. The dream of every day the same. Every day was like the day before but a little better. You ran the stadium a little faster. You bench-pressed a little more. You hit the ball a little harder in the cage; you watched the tape with Schwartzy afterward and gained a little insight into your swing. Your swing grew a little simpler. Everything grew simpler, little by little. You ate the same food, woke up at the same time, wore the same clothes. Hitches, bad habits, useless thoughts—whatever you didn’t need slowly fell away. Whatever was simple and useful remained. You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever.

By the old she meant everyone who loved something younger—her dad but also David, and even the twentysomething guys she’d hooked up with in high school. Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes. You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo.

It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like their first meeting on the steps of the gym, when he’d hardly so much as glanced at her. With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose; she felt watched, observed, like the prize inhabitant of a zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back, to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her.

“You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul—not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those who knew you.

“This is a baseball term? Use it in a sentence.” “Instead of bunting, I swung away.” “I found it interesting,” said Dr. Rachels, “that you chose to say Laying down a bunt the way a person might say Laying down my life. You’re familiar with this passage from the Gospel of John? Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”