Only cheerleaders get anorexia. You're a ballplayer--you're having a spiritual crisis

Henry's glove Zero is now my second favourite baseball mitt in literature
(after Ally's glove in The Catcher In The Rye)

now that shortstop Derek Jeter has retired and the baseball playoff season is upon us, I thought I'd repost this from two years ago (it wasn't my favourite novel of 2012 but it was in my top ten)...
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You ever read a book that was so good that once you finished it that you began it again immediately? No me neither. Well not for a long time anyway. I did this however with Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding which is the sweetest debut novel I've read since Zadie Smith's White Teeth. This is what good literary fiction should be: arresting, witty, passionate, with great characters and an elegant prose style. On the surface its the story of a young blue collar shortstop called Henry Skrimshander and a kid called Mike Schwartz who scouts Henry for a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. Schwartz works on Henry like a big brother mentor gone mad and turns him from a savant shortstop who can't hit or run into a legitimate baseball prospect. That's the surface but what the book is really about is loyalty and friendship and disappointment and love. You know, life. 
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Just as Henry is on the verge of greatness he catches Chuck Knoblauch/Steve Blass disease, or as they call it in golf, the yips. There's a nice subplot about the President of the University, his daughter and a love quadrangle between her, Henry, Mike and Henry's gay room-mate Owen; but for me the book's heart was the relationship between Mike and Henry and how they become brothers. 
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What makes Harbach a much better writer than someone like, say, Jonathan Franzen, (or Jonathan Safran Froer or Michael Chabon) is that Harbach writes with an authentic blue collar voice than doesn't sound fake and condescending. Most American novelists writing literary fiction are the victims of private schools and elite universities and the Iowa Writers Workshop which inculcates phoniness and renders them incapable of understanding or expressing what it is to be poor in America. I know nothing of Harbach's background except that he went to Harvard, but he writes as if he knows what its like to work in a foundry or get up at 5.a.m. to wash dishes. Whether he actually knows or is just very gifted is neither here nor there. He gives us characters in blue collar occupations who don't know where the next rent check is going to come from and these characters are utterly convincing. You can tell the difference Harbach dialogue and Froer/Franzen dialogue immediately. It's the difference between the authentic and the inauthentic, the real and the patronising. (If I was on the Romney campaign I'd slip this book to the candidate for immediate bedtime reading.)
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Like all great baseball novels there is an element of yearning and transcendence in The Art of Fielding. Baseball is not America's past-time (that in fact is football) but if America were a more perfect place it would be. The Art of Fielding joins Shoeless Joe, The Natural, The Great American Novel, The Boys of Summer, Bang The Drum Slowly and Moneyball as one of the great baseball books. Baseball, like cricket, is an intellectual game, where intellect (and thinking too much) will kill you on the field. I liked this short conversation between Mike and Henry near the end of the novel: 
  
"This is the psych floor," Mike said.
Henry nodded. "Okay."
"Figured I'd give you a heads up. They're going to send in the shrinks to talk to you about not eating. 'Your anorexia', as they referred to it."
"Okay."
"I told them only cheerleaders get anorexia. You're a ballplayer--you're having a spiritual crisis." 

Lethem Binge

a repost from last year and, I guess, part of my ongoing influences series...
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If you're like me (and for your own sake I hope to God you're not) when you find a new author that you like you simply have to read everything by them that you can get your hands on, bingeing horribly on their words for weeks at a time until you just can't read anymore. I suppose Tolkien was the first author I consumed like that, devouring The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and even the largely unreadable Silmarillion in the Christmas holidays of 1979. A few years later I read the entire Raymond Chandler oeuvre in one week and when I discovered Cormac McCarthy a few years after that it was a wonderful sensation knowing that I was probably the only person in my high school that had heard of him. I had to hunt high and low to find copies of his books in Northern Ireland, but hunt I did and had Cormac McCarthy polished off in a fortnight. My Dostoyevsky binge in my first year of law school took me an entire term and my eccentric Melville completist phase took over a year (you try reading Clarel some time (or better yet don't)). As you get older you're unlikely to run into authors you haven't read before but when you do and you get one you like it can be just as fun. I wolfed through the David Mitchell collection in a week a couple of years back. Earlier this year I went on a mad dash through Michel Houllebecq (the hilarious Platform is the one to read there) and over the last month I've been reading the collected works of Jonathan Lethem. Like all the best novelists Lethem is very hit and miss. (Mediocre writers don't experiment and thus don't have epic failures or epic successes.) His early science fiction novels are ok as far as they go but his early mystery novel Motherless Brooklyn is unique, strange, funny and all together brilliant. It's the story of a detective with Tourettes trying to discover who knifed his boss and left him in a Dumpster in Brooklyn, but it's the characters and the style that really sing here not so much the plot. After Motherless Brooklyn Chronic City is a bit of a disappointment: a washed up child star and a pothead Rolling Stone essayist dick around the Upper East Side of Manhattan while the child star's astronaut fiance is stuck on the International Space Station. Lethem's true genius comes to the fore the narrower his focus gets and this is the case with his masterwork The Fortress of Solitude which is about life on one block in Brooklyn in the late 60's and 70's. It's clearly heavily autobiographical and although the blurb says that its the story of the friendship between two boys, one white and another black, it's actually about much more than that. It's a kind of history of the gentrification of Brooklyn and along the way we get tales about the music, fashions, street culture, stick ball games, comic books, graffiti styles, food, folk wisdom and life in general during the 70's. I loved Fortress of Solitude, it's such a rich, dense book, every page brimming with good stuff. It reminded me so much of my life on Coronation Road in Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus during the 70's - a street that was also full of kids playing arcane games with colourful eccentric characters by the score. Dean Street in Brooklyn is a mix of rich and poor, working class, middle class, artists, dreamers, blue collar city employees, with the added dimension of complex race politics. Lethem was lucky to have grown up in such a rich and fascinating environment for a writer and he's done justice to his source material.
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Too many novels these days don't have a good line in the whole book, Fortress has good lines in virtually every paragraph. Lethem doesn't push the prose, he just is patient enough to distill the sentences into economical nuggets of universal truth. There are a few negatives of course: the book is long and does outstay its welcome a little when we jump from the crazy energy of 70's Dean Street to the narrator's college years; I also wasn't completely convinced by the magical realism which I can't talk about at all without giving away major spoilers. But these are minor quibbles - the ending is terrific and like I say the first two thirds of the book is utterly brilliant. 
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This has been a great reading year for me and I'm happy to say that in the last few months I've read two modern American masterpieces, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Jonathan Lethem's wonderful Fortress of Solitude.

Books of the Year

We're half way through the year and so far its been a really great reading year for me. (Unlike last year which was a bit sparse.) I've read 32 books, which is quite a bit above my normal average and most of them have been really rather good. Here's the 11 books that got As in my little notebook in chronological order: 

January: Arguably - Christopher Hitchens 

February: Platform - Michel Houllebecq; Slaughter's Hound - Declan Burke

March: The Complete Essays of George Orwell; The Art of Fielding - Chad 

Harbach; The Red Queen - Matt Ridley

April: Vanished Kingdoms - Norman Davies; The Nameless Dead - Brian McGilloway

May: Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel; Manhunt - Peter Bergen

June: 2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson

My Local Bookshop

In a belated response to Farhad Manjoo's misinformed and poorly written attack on bookshops in Slate Magazine I thought I would tell you about my local bookshop: Readings on Acland Street here in St. Kilda. Readings is a great local bookshop with a friendly atmosphere, opinionated staff who know the stock, and a handy location right in the heart of St. Kilda opposite half a dozen cake shops and patisseries. 
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Bookshop worker George Orwell used to live in fear of the little old lady who would appear on a busy Saturday morning asking for the "novel that came out a few years ago with the green cover, about the man, who was doing all those things." At Readings St. Kilda I believe they would find you that book because they love literature and they pride themselves on being well read. Contra Farhad Manjoo bookshops are a sign of high civilization and any town or large city district without one isn't really partaking of the culture at all. Readings is a notch above your average bookshop with a terrific children's section and (I love this) separate sections for Penguin Books, Faber, the New York Review of Books Press, Dalkey Archive Press and other terrific independent or smaller quality labels. 
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Sometimes Australian books can be a little bit pricey so when I do buy a novel I want it to be excellent before I lay down my cash. At Readings they don't mind if you read for a while before purchasing. For the last week or so I've been checking out Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and I'm now at page 30 and it's pretty good - so I think I'm going to buy it, unless the Melbourne Age sends me a free copy which I don't think they will because they already reviewed it. 
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Another good thing about Readings is that they don't serve coffee, muffins, biscotti, tea, herbal tea or anything that you can eat or drink. The only reason to enter the shop is to buy a book, or, admittedly one of the vinyl records at the back. I'm not knocking desperate book shop owners who've had to convert their shops into cafes to get the punters in, but its nice in Readings not to hear the annoying hiss of the espresso machine or to find muffin crumbs on the floor. What you might hear however is some eclectic music. Last week I was pleasantly surprised to get the Blade Runner soundtrack album which I've never heard in another bookshop, ever. 
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Ok that's that. If you're in Sydney check out Jon Page's wonderful bookshop (see previous post). If you're in St. Kilda do check out Readings. (I have nothing to gain from this if you do. They have no idea who I am and I don't even know if they stock my books as I avoid the crime section.) And the cake shops across the street are pretty damn good too. Oh and if you're looking for the only place that sells Ruddles County or Marston's Pedigree in Australia try Acland Cellars also just across the street.