Tim Madigan

1. Since childhood, which was a long, long time ago, I have yearned to write a novel, publish it, and become obscenely rich. It’s finally about to happen, especially the obscenely rich part. After many years and many excruciating drafts, I just sent my literary debut to my agent, and it’s pretty damn good. But never in a thousand lifetimes (or however long the Dalai Lama lives) could I hope to achieve what Chad Harbach has in The Art of Fielding, due out in paperback in a few days. Hence the hatred.

During a decades-long apprenticeship as writer, I have read and studied many of the so-called giants: Bellow; Roth; Mailer; Delillo; Foster Wallace; Steinbeck; Fitzgerald; Hemingway; Morrison; and Updike. (I tried Jonathan Franzen, but he seemed to despise his characters, and if he didn’t like them…) I’ve also dallied with McMurtry; LeCarre’, and lately, Scotland’s Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson. But Harbach’s book, at least to my middlebrow tastes, eclipses the novels of all those others. Sorry, Lonesome Dove. Sorry, My Antonia. Sorry, Grapes of Wrath. The Art of Fielding is my favorite novel, ever. That does not mean I can’t hate its author.

2. The Art of Fielding is breathtakingly imagined, full of small details that make Harbach’s world utterly three-dimensional, like reading in hi-def. For one memorable example, he describes the spokes on the underside of a Gatorade cap. (Come on.) And eating Boston Clam Chowder:

“He lifted the container and took a sip, parted his lips to let through a cube of potato, a chewy dollop of clam.”

Show off. What’s wrong with, “He took a sip of soup.”?

3. Baseball, its rhythms and nuances, is the fulcrum around which Harbach’s story rotates. The Westish Harpooners are a heretofore hapless Division III program, playing home games on a tidy campus in Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Shortstop Henry Skrimshander has been willed from small-town obscurity to first-round greatness by the maniacal lumberjack of a team captain, Mike Schwartz. Then something happens to Henry. (See: Blass, Steve) In his narrative, Harbach flaunts a subterranean understanding of the game, down to the smallest sunflower seed shell on the dugout floor. This insight, with the quality of his prose, sets a new standard for writing about the sport.

“The throw was high and fluttered higher. Henry wanted it back as soon as it left his hand; even as he finished his follow-through his fingertips grasped after the ball, as if he could bring it back. Mother#@%^&.”

Sorry, Field of Dreams. Sorry, The Natural. If I hate Chad Harbach, think how Bernard Malamud must feel.

Him, Chad Harbach

4. I was an athlete myself once, ice hockey and baseball. (In fact, I played a little small college baseball, and might still hold the school record at the University of North Dakota for wild pitches in an inning.) I’ve always felt that the locker room was a sacred place, without really knowing why. Leave it to Mr. I’ve-Written-the-Best-Novel-Ever to tell me.

“Locker rooms, in Schwartz’s experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity that a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable; just before a game and just after. Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world, and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn’t carry your game-time emotions out into the world—you’d be put in an asylum if you did—so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven.”

I never punched a teammate in the face, but everything else is dead on. You would think I might have figured this out for myself.

5. Pella Affenlight is the daughter of Westish College president Guert, from whom she has been long estranged. She is twenty-three, beautiful, brilliant, damaged, and kind. She had been living in San Francisco before ditching her ill-matched husband, David, and returning to her father at Westish. Every word that comes from her mouth crackles.

Consider the scene in a restaurant, when David shows up at Westish to try reclaim her. He chastises her for taking off without giving them a chance to talk it through.

Pella slugged back the rest of her wine. “Right,” she said. “I can imagine how that conversation would have gone. ‘Uh, David, I’m leaving you because you’re controlling and unreasonable and debilitatingly jealous. You don’t want me to work, don’t want me in school, don’t even want me to learn to drive. So, uh, whaddya think, sweetie?”

I have a crush on Pella, which is just plain wrong. Blame that on Chad Harbach, whom I hate.

6. In early morning, Mike Schwartz opens his final law school rejection letter in the athletic center whirlpool. A few minutes later, having come for her swim, Pella finds a lumberjack she has never met, sitting on the steps of the building, in a snowstorm, wearing only a towel. “Nice towel,” Pella said.

“I didn’t get in,” he said heavily.

“Get in what?”

He pointed between his shower-thonged feet, where an envelope was bng buried by the snow. “Law school.”

“That’s that you’re sitting here in a blizzard? Because you got rejected from law school?”

“Yes.”

“Your loincloth’s kind of riding up there.”

This scene ripped my heart out. I don’t have a heart to spare, which is another reason I hate Chad Harbach.

7. The season comes down to a climactic game. Henry is the pivotal batter in the last inning. After four hundred pages of near-magic, I thought Harbach had written himself into a corner. I could not see how he could avoid plummeting into cliché. But he didn’t. Instead he fashioned a plot twist that I couldn’t have imagined if I lived as long as the Dalai Lama. Only a writer with that subterranean understanding of the game could have been capable of pulling it off. Harbach did, and I hate him.

8. On the way home to Texas from a recent family wedding in Michigan, my wife and I changed planes twice. It would have been a brutal day of travel, and in some respects I guess it was, but it gave me the chance to read The Art of Fielding for six hours straight. Which I did. Not because there was a murder to solve, the narrative engine behind most of my recent reading. But because I cared so deeply about Harbach’s characters, and I desperately wanted to know how things would turn out for them. So, yes, I loved Harbach’s characters, and I hate the author himself.

Okay. Maybe hate is a little too strong a word.