Aegis 2012
104
Book Review >>> Justin McAtee
The Art of Fielding Chad Harbach. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011. 528 pp.
Chad Harbach, thirty-something scion of the same Brooklyn-based literary dynasty of Ivy-educated whiz-kids that gave us the likes of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, has recently joined the ranks of his aforementioned mentors as one of the most lauded literary talents in 21st century America. May all young writers who presently aspire toward the title of Major American Novelist take notice: Not only does the bar rest very high, but Harbach has raised it with a document that proves his giftedness as a storyteller. The Art of Fielding is as stirring, sophisticated, and utterly convincing a debut novel as one can imagine—completely worthy of the hype it has received. The story’s drama centers on the virginal, unassuming figure of one Henry Skrimshander, feather-boned shortstop savant and mild-mannered savior of the Westish College Harpooners, a scrappy crew of Division III underdogs captained by the burly and bearded Mike Schwartz, an intractable Ahab of a captain who also happens to be Henry’s mentor, champion, and closest companion. Schwartz’s commanding, Greek-god physique belies an unorthodox dream among college athletes: to graduate from Harvard Law and become a public intellectual in the vein of Westish College’s sixty-year-old ex-football star president, Guert Affenlight, who three decades earlier forsook his own athletic prowess in exchange for Ivory Tower enlightenment. But now, on the cusp of a three-quarter-life crisis, his years of inquiry seem to have left him short in wisdom and long in reputation as an Ivory Tower figure of a decidedly different kind—an ultra-potent, post-tenure American male academic, deepvoiced, majestically bearded, armed with knowledge, and beginning to realize in the lurid light of life’s late afternoon that his coveted Scotch collection is going to outlive him. Things begin to fall apart for the three men in the space of a single day, and soon their lives are interweaving, the tension tightening under Harbach’s deft guidance. Henry makes an errant throw that hospitalizes a teammate. Guert falls in love with Westish’s most brilliant student, just as his daughter/intellectual prodigy, Pella, arrives in town to restart her life after a failed marriage to one of her former teachers. Schwartz realizes he has devoted four years to a cause he no longer believes in, and Henry’s close friend and only “gay mulatto roommate,” Owen Cross, is swept into a crisis of passion. Meditations abound on the cult-like rituals associated with different brands of American masculinity, with Harbach mining beneath the fist-pumps and black gown peacockery of athletes and academics to unearth the death-denying motivations behind them, a la Don DeLillo’s White Noise though here there’s far less cynicism The Art of Fielding is, rather,
