THE ART OF FIELDING

Big League Anxiety on the Baseball Diamond - By GREGORY COWLES, New York Times, Published: September 9, 2011

To defenders of baseball and literary fiction, the charges against each are familiar, and overlapping: too slow, too precious, not enough action. The only realistic response is a resigned shrug. Guilty, and so what? You may as well complain that lemons are too yellow. The indictment amounts to a kind of category error; detractors went looking for entertainment, and found art instead.

THE ART OF FIELDING

By Chad Harbach

512 pp. Little, Brown & Co. US$25.99.

NZ - Fourth Estate - NZ$36.99

Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel, “The Art of Fielding.” “You loved it,” he writes of the game, “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”

If it seems a stretch for a baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and the entire human condition in its mitt, well, “The Art of Fielding” isn’t really a baseball novel at all, or not only. It’s also a campus novel and a bromance (and for that matter a full-fledged gay romance), a comedy of manners and a tragicomedy of errors — the baseball kind as well as the other kind, which as Alexander Pope pointed out also has something to do with the human condition.Full review at New York Times.