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A review by drewsof
The Cactus League by Emily Nemens
5.0
5+ out of 5.
I don't like baseball. Never found it terribly interesting to watch. So why, then, do I find it so compelling to read? Perhaps it is the structure, a hypothesis about which Robert Coover and now Emily Nemens might agree. More so than football or basketball or soccer or really any other sport, the structure and simplicity of baseball lends itself well to narrative storytelling. 3 outs, 4 bases, 9 innings: there is a structure here.
Nemens uses the 9-inning structure to tell a novel-in-stories, about a superstar baseball player crashing out over the course of spring training. The setting is Arizona and the novel crackles with the strange cold-heat of the desert in winter. We hear from Jason Goodyear's agent, one of the co-owners of the team, a woman he spends the night with after his divorce. Characters don't recur, exactly, in the manner of [b:A Visit from the Goon Squad|7331435|A Visit from the Goon Squad|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356844046l/7331435._SX50_.jpg|8975330] but there are moments of connection and return -- and there are also stories that start and end and we've barely caught a glimpse before they that go spinning off like a foul ball or (perhaps more accurately) a player being traded to another team.
I don't know that I loved the overarching narrator device. I don't know that I cared about one or two of the stories in the way I cared about the rest. But I was riveted by the titanic collapse of Jason Goodyear, in a way I never could care about a real baseballer. And that, friends, is true talent on Emily Nemens' part.
(Also, the book is just killer on the sentence level. Hot damn.)
I don't like baseball. Never found it terribly interesting to watch. So why, then, do I find it so compelling to read? Perhaps it is the structure, a hypothesis about which Robert Coover and now Emily Nemens might agree. More so than football or basketball or soccer or really any other sport, the structure and simplicity of baseball lends itself well to narrative storytelling. 3 outs, 4 bases, 9 innings: there is a structure here.
Nemens uses the 9-inning structure to tell a novel-in-stories, about a superstar baseball player crashing out over the course of spring training. The setting is Arizona and the novel crackles with the strange cold-heat of the desert in winter. We hear from Jason Goodyear's agent, one of the co-owners of the team, a woman he spends the night with after his divorce. Characters don't recur, exactly, in the manner of [b:A Visit from the Goon Squad|7331435|A Visit from the Goon Squad|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356844046l/7331435._SX50_.jpg|8975330] but there are moments of connection and return -- and there are also stories that start and end and we've barely caught a glimpse before they that go spinning off like a foul ball or (perhaps more accurately) a player being traded to another team.
I don't know that I loved the overarching narrator device. I don't know that I cared about one or two of the stories in the way I cared about the rest. But I was riveted by the titanic collapse of Jason Goodyear, in a way I never could care about a real baseballer. And that, friends, is true talent on Emily Nemens' part.
(Also, the book is just killer on the sentence level. Hot damn.)