First on my postseason baseball reading list was W. P. Kinsella's Butterfly Winter. Perhaps you will recall Kinsella as the dude who wrote Shoeless Joe which then became Field of Dreams which seemed pretty amazing when you were twelve but then got kind of embarrassing for a couple decades but now seems pretty OK actually? Well he's back! This was the first thing he had published in forever and I was intrigued when he said in an interview that, "On a true baseball field the foul lines diverge forever, eventually taking in a good part of the universe," because frankly that seems like an excellent thing to say. And a couple of chapters in, I was really feeling this one; it was like, oh hey cool, it is another magic realist baseball novel from a dude who knows how to do this. Here we have a pitcher and a catcher from a made-up Caribbean nation who were not only born to play baseball but conceived to play baseball: they stared down shadowy ghostly batters in the womb. It is clear from infancy that this pitcher is uncommonly gifted, but he will only pitch to his brother, a philosophical but mediocre catcher who would be nowhere without his brother but his brother would be nowhere without him because he can't pitch to anyone else and so there you go.
Awesome, right? Well it is, for like a minute, but the novel is framed in this kind of shitty way by "The Gringo Journalist" who is trying to establish what is up with this mysterious figure known only as "The Wizard" who is a legit wizard apparently, and it gets awfully tiresome. Also it appears that W. P. Kinsella is not nuts about women. And things get all fantastical with such frequency that soon enough, you don't care that the butterflies cover bodies entwined in the act of sexing it and settle there for all a winter, or whatever. I finished it, because I am a scholar of the utmost seriousness and probably also renown, but Kinsella lost me for good when like a hundred and eighty pages in (or something), the obviously unreliable narrator says something like I am you see what is sometimes called an unreliable narrator and it is like oh dude come on unless I guess you really needed a topic for your second-year CanLit essay or whatever; in that one specific instance, you would be thrilled, and I should not diminish that. But yeah don't bother.
In contrast to Kinsella's Butterfly Winter, which is bad and you shouldn't read, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding is basically the best and if you don't read it you will be dumb. In the early going, one understandably assumes that the central text around which the awesome and totally real characters in this novel are going to orbit is the fictional and titular (lol) Art of Fielding by the equally fictional Aparicio Rodriguez, the greatest shortstop to ever live: we get a number of short excerpts from that non-existent text, which seems to be written in the style of Goethe's Maxims and Reflections except that it is mostly about grounders. But before long you realize that the central text here is in fact Moby Dick, and not just in a singular-obsession-white-whale kind of way, although that is definitely there, but in a broader "here is what friendship is like or can be" way, like a prolonged meditation on Queequeg and Ishmael tucked into bed just being bros or something. Also there is totally a statue of Melville looking out over the water that everybody in the novel visits and the college they are at is totally in thrall to a brief visit Melville made there for a like a second and the baseball team is called the Harpooners, so it is not like I am putting on a dazzling hermeneutic display when I suggest to you that Melville matters here. (An aside: "Why couldn't it have been 'Harpooneers,' that would have been so much cooler," I would ask Chad Harbach if I had the chance, and he would be like, "I got a six-hundred thousand dollar advance for my first novel; it's probably OK with the one 'e'" and I would be like "why do you have to be like that Chad Harbach I totally liked your book.")
In addition to showing that Harbach has read everything you have read plus like two other things, making the breadth of his literary knowledge seem limitless,The Art of Fielding also manages to be pretty much the best thing you will read in that kind-of-genre that is the university novel. We all have our favourites! There is of course Lucky Jim. I am or at least was really partial to Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels but I have this thing where I won't reread any of the Davies stuff because I have a suspicion that I might not actually like it that much if I were to look at it again so I am going to content myself with the slightly vague memory that all of those books own. But the Art of Fielding manages even to exceed my probably incorrect recollection of how awesome The Rebel Angels was on the topic of just, like, what a university (or "college" if that is your way) is like, which is a subject I enjoy an awful lot. What, for instance, is the interior life of a college president named "Guert" really like? Find out! Spoiler alert: you will be moved.
Still on the topic of spoilers, briefly: do not under any circumstances read the "advance praise" blurbs on the back of the hardcover, because one of them totally, completely, absolutely blows the ending. It's not like it's a biggest deal, but the last ten pages or so manage to establish a certain amount of narrative tension again after you think pretty much everything is over and settled and you're good, and if you have read one particular blurb from the back, you would be completely free of that tension, which would be unfortunate. I always ditch the dust jacket whilst reading because they are floppy so I was OK but when I grabbed it to reassemble the whole package for stately display on my bookshelf as evidence to my guests who do not exist that I had in fact read the novel that everybody is right to not shut up about right now I could not help but notice that son of a gun, there is advance praise that totally blows the ending, what is the deal.
So yeah, real quick: Butterfly Winter can totally be ignored; you're fine. The Art of Fielding, though, is the best American novel since the last time you were like "this is the best American novel since . . ." which probably means the last time you really liked a Michael Chabon or something? But really, honestly, in the most serious of ways, you should read The Art of Fielding, because it will be among the best things you will read about baseball or college or fellowship or, like, the soul or any number of other things that are also important.
KS
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