The Art of Fielding

You are probably familiar with the phrase that baseball is a metaphor for life.  Well, I'm not that big of a baseball fan--unless of course I'm at the ballpark with a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other.  So as you can imagine, I had my concerns about Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, a novel centered on college shortstop Henry Skrimshander.  However, what makes this book so fascinating are the other metaphors taking place within its pages.

Relatively early on in the story, you find out that the fictional Westish College (a bucolic liberal arts school somewhere in the midwest) has interesting ties to Herman Melville, famed author of Moby Dick and erstwhile seaman.  And so, when hearing about the grueling training exercises Henry and his fellow players go through in the impossible pursuit of perfection, one can't help but make the connection to Ahab's monomaniacal search for the white whale.  Similarly, the sometimes tenuous, homosocial ties that inevitably exist between teammates echos the fractious bonds that hold together Ishmael and his shipmates--these are people who didn't choose each other, yet rely on one another for survival.

Oftentimes, when authors are trying to weave together these types of analogies, it seems like character development can get sacrificed.  However, Harbach manages to effortlessly balance these ideas with a heartwarming rendering of the book's main characters.  Henry, Schwartz, Owen, Pella, and Affenlight are all so immensely relatable, so empathetically portrayed, that I found my thoughts wandering their way even when I wasn't reading the book.  Is Affenlight's love requited?  Will Schwartz get into law school?  And Henry, oh Henry...that's all I can say until you've read the book.

Just like Moby Dick is about more than the title whale, Harbach's Fielding is about much more than baseball, which for me at least, is very good news.