A review by adamz24
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

3.0

The Art of Fielding is a member of that species which most compulsive readers have a conflicted relationship with: the literary sensation. There's no doubt that this book has been hyped to an almost ridiculous degree. Still, my expectations weren't very high, even though I love baseball and these sorts of college town settings etc.

Many of us are familiar with Harbach from n+1 and articles in numerous magazines. As a literary author, Harbach is oddly distanced from that writer. This book's biggest flaws lie in its tendency to a kind of conservatism that is relatively absent in at least two of the major recent influences on this novel, Don DeLillo's End Zone and (the ETA portions, at least, of) David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Harbach's prose is rarely problematic, but he rarely takes risks either as a stylist or in the construction of this book's story. When he does, The Art of Fielding does achieve the sort of transcendent brilliance many critics and other readers would lead you to believe it achieves more consistently. Wallace, although he is discussed and analyzed in any number of critical frameworks, was ultimately interested primarily in human emotional struggles (certainly more than stylistic hijinks) and high thematics. What made Infinite Jest probably the greatest American novel of the last half-century was Wallace's ability to write that sort of thing while bringing something genuinely new to the table. In other words, he wasn't merely a notably competent artist in the way Harbach and Franzen are, but a truly great artist.

The Art of Fielding bears resemblance to Infinite Jest (and DeLillo's End Zone further back, the novel Harbach once pointed to while discussing Infinite Jest) in numerous ways. Various characters are similar to characters from IJ, the setting is similar, the manner in which baseball is written about here is similar to how DFW approached tennis (both on a literal and metaphorical level). But where Infinite Jest never, ever was trite, The Art of Fielding frequently is, especially when the novel veers away from baseball and deals with pretty mundane and... trite details of various interconnecting personal lives and relationships. Small, mundane moments that need to work to subtly build the characters and story are routinely fucked up in execution, and often don't feel necessary, but instead like the results of poor initial planning. The Art of Fielding took nine years to write (nothing wrong with that), and you can often tell (something is definitely wrong with that), because the mental frameworks of the characters and the larger story seem to jump around so incoherently. I'm not the first person to mention Infinite Jest while talking about this book, and for that reason I'd like to emphasize that this is, despite the similarities and Harbach's very public admiration of Wallace, a very different book, and isn't really Infinite Jest-lite at all. But it's similar enough that it's hard not to point to IJ as a book that does much of what The Art of Fielding does, and does it so much better.

The last fifty pages or so are terrific, and most of the first 200 or so also are, but the novel is definitely too long, and I frequently had traumatic flashbacks to reading I Am Charlotte Simmons. This book is never as bad as that one is throughout its billion pages, but the human interactions often have the same stilted, artificial feel to them. And that is unfortunate, because Harbach, as he repeatedly demonstrates, is capable of writing some really touching human moments, during the baseball scenes and during other scenes.

The Art of Fielding is a promising first novel from an interesting enough novelist, but that's about it.

And one more thing: critics, especially those on the literary end of things, seem compulsively interested in denying that The Art of Fielding is 'mere baseball fiction.' I understand that the publisher wants to sell, obviously, to people who aren't baseball fans, but I'm not just talking about the blurbs on the book. Everywhere you look for writings on this book you can find someone minimizing the baseball angle. The funny thing is that, as Harbach surely understands, this entire book is filtered through baseball, fundamentally built on baseball and the nature and dynamic of the game. That is also where the book gets much of its literary merit. Baseball metaphors are commonplace in North America (mostly sex-related in pop culture but not close to exclusively so) even amongst people who don't like baseball, or even know baseball, and to take baseball and make it metaphorically, thematically, and literally the central basis on which your first novel is built is real gutsy, and is a real artistic feat. So, although I have no influence or currency, I'd like to buck the trend and emphasize rather than minimize just how important baseball is to this novel. As one other reviewer on GR mentions, people who don't understand/like baseball will likely relate to some of these characters and enjoy the overall story, but will probably miss out on the beauty of Harbach's baseball writing, and on some of the novel's greatest literary merit.