The Art of Fielding
-
-
4.2 • 105 Ratings
-
-
- £5.99
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
‘It's left a little hole in my life the way a really good book will’ Jonathan Franzen
A small American college. Five very different lives. One terrible mistake.
At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for the big league until a routine throw goes disastrously off course. His error will upend the fates of five people. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.
As the season counts down to its climactic final game, all five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recalling works as disparate as Chaim Potok's The Chosen, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and Scott Lasser's Battle Creek, Harbach's big-hearted and defiantly old-fashioned debut demonstrates the rippling effects of a single baseball gone awry. When college shortstop phenom Henry Skrimshander accidentally beans teammate Owen Dunne with a misplaced throw, it starts a chain reaction on the campus of Westish College, "that little school in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin." Owen is solicitously visited in the hospital by school president Guert Affenlight, a widower, who falls in love with the seductive gay student, a "serious breech of professional conduct" that sends potentially devastating ripples through the school. Affenlight's daughter, Pella, after a failed marriage in San Francisco, returns to become part of a love triangle with Henry and Mike Schwartz, the team captain and Henry's unofficial mentor. And just when Henry's hopes of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals come within reach, he suffers a crisis of confidence, even as his team makes a rousing run at the championship. Through it all, Henry finds inspiration in the often philosophically tinged teachings found in The Art of Fielding ("Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does"), by a fictional retired shortstop. Harbach manages incisive characterizations of his five main players, even as his narrative, overlong and prone to affectation, tests the reader's patience.
Customer Reviews
The Art of Fielding
This saga of a Mid-western college baseball team is funny and engaging, and discernible to a Brit whose only seen the game in movies.
It charts the lives of five main characters with an accompanying supporting cast through a year of so of college life. There are shades of a three reel Hollywood movie about the plot, but this reader was kept captivated by the dialogue and plot.
The Art of Fielding
One of the most enjoyable books I have read in years. Fabulous characters that keep the plot moving from highs to lows and further lows before ending on a high. You do not need to know a thing about baseball to get totally lost in this book. Must become a film soon
Elegiac
A passel of beautiful character studies, most of which orbit the lead character (who himself remains largely a cipher). Then the author blends and mixes the relationships, while never taking the easy or sentimental route. Yes, it's about baseball. And Moby Dick. And the way the pen is mightier than the sword.