The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

Warning: This novel is out of genre.

My bros-in-law, the literature prof was telling about the book that publishing houses were bidding for, and then I saw it the next day as the #1 recommendation for September by Amazon. It’s a baseball book, sort of, but not like any baseball book that I’ve read (and there have been many). It’s a first novel.

Henry Skrimshander is a 17 ½ year old phenomenon at shortstop, but he’s old school, all field, no hit. He has grown up worshipping the mythical Aparicio Rodriguez, who not only had a Hall of Fame MLB career, but who also wrote “The Art of Fielding.” The book is the bible for infielders everywhere. It’s a book that Henry has grown up with, carried with him wherever he went, slept with, dreamed about. Beyond high school in South Dakota, Henry has no real prospects and is dreading the end of his senior year. But, then he’s discovered by Mike Schwartz who is not a major league scout, but a small college player who just finished his own freshman year at Westish College in small town Wisconsin. Schwartz is maniacal about his own career, and everything else, and now he has a new focus – the talented but undeveloped Henry. On the one hand, this is a book about Henry and Mike, and it’s about the progress Henry and the team make over the next three years. But it is really a story about coming of age and of developing identities. The author, Harbach, weaves together stories about the college president, his daughter, and others. The prose in this book is far better than most of what we read, and the character development is spectacular. There is an important subtheme on homosexuality, so that might tickle your homophobia, but that too is done well. I could not put this one down, and it gets as many stars as there are in any rating system.