“The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach
Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding was last year’s acclaimed first novel. It’s this month’s selection for one of my book groups (not to be confused with my summer reading project) and it just came out in trade paperback, so it moved to the top of the pile.
I was suspicious. I don’t care much for baseball; I think it’s boring and had an ex-boyfriend who was WAY into it. Also, it was big, and I wanted to bury myself in skinny YA novels from my youth. So I never would have thought I’d tear through the 500+ pages in four days. But that’s exactly what I did, and exactly how engaging and easy to read I found this book.
It’s set at a small midwestern college, and has five main characters, four of whom trade narration. While it’s largely concerned with baseball (three of the five are on the team, and the other two get involved with them in various ways) I found it compelling for its characterizations, its academic setting, and the stories. I cared about these five, even if I sometimes didn’t like them and wanted to shake them. I was interested to see what happened, and blazed through the book so I could find out.
While there’s a lot of Melville and Moby Dick references, a friend on another site noted that she found the book similar in feel to one by John Irving, and I agree. This was a great summer read. It had moments both sad and funny, it was set on a campus, and was a quick read, while being more substantive than breezy. I enjoyed the heck out of it.