Jonathan Beckman

Rough Diamond

The Art of Fielding
By Chad Harbach (Fourth Estate 512pp £16.99)

The Art of Fielding, a hefty book about the fortunes of a college baseball team, has arrived to trumpets and cymbals, as much because of the colossal advance paid for it - Keith Gessen, a friend of the author, has written an e-book just about the novel's auction - as because of the exhortations of Jonathan Franzen in its favour. Henry Skrimshander, the baseball-obsessed son of a South Dakotan blue-collar worker, is given the opportunity to attend Westish College in Wisconsin after he is spotted playing by Mike Schwartz, the captain of the team. Westish is venerable but mouldering, with neither the academic reputation nor the sporting prowess of comparable schools. Schwartz sets out to remedy the second of these derelictions, and Henry is an impeccable shortstop, with an arm strong and true, and a mitt that seems to attract the ball magnetically.

With him as the pivot, the Westish Harpooners are more successful than they have ever been, and Henry is on course to be drafted into the professional league, until a throw goes awry and smashes into the face of one of his teammates. Henry's game, hitherto faultless, becomes increasingly error-prone. His body no longer responds instinctively, and he over-thinks his reactions to the point that he cannot bear to play any longer. He is forced to confront life without the only activity that matters to him.

In counterpoint to Henry's breakdown, the college president Guert Affenlight, hitherto a virtuosic lady's man, begins a heady gay affair with one of the students, while coping with the return of his estranged daughter, who has escaped her domineering husband. A barbed-wire tangle of relationships ensues, which leaves everyone scratched and some more seriously lacerated.

Readers uninterested in American sports - that is, practically all non-Americans - should not pass this book by for that reason. There is something beguiling about incantations such as 'Starblind walked, Sooty Kim bunted him to second, Henry roped a single past the pitcher's ear. Schwartz crushed a moonshot into left-center field', even if the sense is only faintly discerned. Match reports never clog up the plot; unfortunately it's the rest of the writing that takes some digestion.

Practically every attempt at atmospherics ends disastrously: 'the plane's propellers pureed the air'; 'The pumpkin sun had impaled itself on the spire of Westish Chapel and begun to bleed' and, my favourite, 'Shreds of cloud blew past the setting sun, causing shadows to scurry rodentially over the grass.' I'm convinced that Chad Harbach has lifted that 'rodentially' from David Foster Wallace's essay 'The String Theory', in which tennis player Thomas Enqvist is described as looking 'eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain ... with that narrow sort of rodentially patrician quality'. The essay is one of only three citations of the word in the OED and DFW's work is a touchstone of Harbach. It takes ears of burlap, however, not to recognise that this unusual adverb, which works in a comically compressed sketch, sounds utterly inappropriate here.

The book is tormented by a constant anxiety to prove its own literary genealogy, clearly worried that it might otherwise be mistaken for soap opera. References to Moby-Dick abound. Scrimshanders are whittlers of whale bone; Melville had a cousin called Guert. There is a statue of Melville on campus since he once gave a lecture there, which was rediscovered by Affenlight as an undergraduate, leading him to become a Melville scholar. The book has two Ahabs: Skrimshander, who is single-mindedly devoted to becoming the best shortstop ever; and Schwartz, who scoffs down painkillers in order to play, since his joints have been ground down on the football field. Their dedication to their teammates cloaks their own need for vindication.

The Art of Fielding, however, has none of the strangeness and obliquity of Moby-Dick. Take, for example, the matter of introductions: 'Call me Ishmael' is such an arresting opening because it simultaneously buttonholes, reveals yet conceals. Henry's first meeting with a college friend leaves nothing undetermined: 'My name's Owen Dunne. I'll be your gay mulatto roommate.' Within two pages, Owen is acting in a play, reading novels in French and eating 'fruit and crackers' with his boyfriend. Even Henry, who rarely shows evidence of cognition, let alone intelligence, ought to have been able to work out that his roommate was a walking cliché.

This is merely a single example of what can only be termed 'positive capability', as the book is slowly clubbed into fatuity by Harbach's determination to obliterate ambiguity and implication. This starts with the novel's structure. It does not require mighty powers of perception to notice that the vicissitudes of a baseball team might serve as an allegory for life, love and everything else; and that the college could be a microcosm of the world. We're helpfully informed of 'the paradox at the heart of baseball ... You loved it because you considered it an art ... which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition.' But don't worry if it's still not obvious: there's always the titular The Art of Fielding. It's a slim book owned by practically all the characters, which has no plot function, but comprises a series of koans relating baseball to metaphysics such as 'Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does' and 'There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.' If that doesn't clear things up, even Harbach has nothing more to offer.

Nonetheless, this goofy novel is compulsively readable (an epithet now encumbered with literary politics). Like Franzen, Chad Harbach can spool out plot and haul the reader along in his wake. The ending takes an unexpected and comic gothic twist, which leaves one hoping that he will one day tell a story with a little more élan.

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Jonathan Beckman is an editor at Literary Review. He is writing a book about eighteenth century France.