The Art Of Fielding Throws The Ball Away

B.R. Myers writes a scathing review of the it novel of 2011, The Art of Fielding:

Enough; writing too much about a novel this slight is as unfair as writing too little. Sometimes the only way to counter the literary establishment’s corruption of standards is to take a highly praised trifle apart, for one’s own benefit if no one else’s, but as I have said, the publicity that launched The Art of Fielding was a rather innocuous affair. Just the year before, a mediocre book that is already half forgotten had been touted as a classic for the ages, and its author likened to the greatest novelist of all time; that was some serious bullshit. Misrepresenting a dull story as an engrossing one is nothing in comparison. I realize some reviewers mentioned Moby-Dick and The Art of Fielding in the same breath, which was certainly a bit much, but the point being made was at least an arguable one: just as we don’t need to like whaling to enjoy the one novel, we don’t need to be baseball fans to enjoy the other. Exactly what it is we need to be, I’m not sure.
All of this will come as small consolation to serious readers suckered into buying Harbach’s book, but they should have known better. As long as the classics remain more deeply relevant to our lives than the novels our own time produces, we should remain “untimely,” in Nietzsche’s still-dangerous sense of the word. This means being more and not less skeptical of advertising when it deals with new books. Testimonials solicited before publication are exactly that: solicited. They are scarcely worth reading at all, as the back cover of The Art of Fielding demonstrates. No articulate person who really “gave [himself] over completely” to a novel “and scarcely paused for meals” would then describe it (as Jay McInerney did) as “an autonomous universe, much like the one we inhabit, though somehow more vivid”—which is either meaningless or deranged, depending on how seriously you take the “vivid” part. To quote the British scholar Ian Robinson: “An emotion can safely be judged a fake if the language does not convey it.”

I enjoyed the book, but I can see what he's getting at.  It seems that modern novels try too hard to dwell on the mundane, and sometimes base details of life.  The book does do that.  But I definitely enjoyed the baseball portion of the novel, especially with the Steve Blass mental block angle.  When I was at the Reds game on Saturday, Rick Ankiel was playing in centerfield.  In my lifetime, there have been four notable cases of a player becoming unable to throw the ball accurately: Steve Sax, Mark Wohlers, Chuck Knoblauch and Rick Ankiel, and nobody melted down more brutally, nor came back in a more unique way than Ankiel did.  He was unbelievable in his rookie year, and then in the playoffs, he just blew up.  He was never the same, and had to quit pitching.  But he could hit superlatively for a pitcher, and was able to work his way back up through the minors as an outfielder.  I can only imagine what kind of brutal taunts he took from drunks like me in all the podunk one-horse towns he had to play in on his way back.  He's been a journeyman outfielder, but the fact that he made it back to the bigs is amazing.  For me, that angle made The Art of Fielding worth reading.  Here is a little video from when he went back to the minors as a pitcher.  The camera work is terrible, but you get the drift.