Chad Harbach's 'The Art of Fiedling' on the dreams and insecurities of provincial America

[mfarcas at mail.com]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/07/art-of-fielding-baseball-novel 

The Art of Fielding: baseball, growing up and the great American novel
It took ten years to write and was turned down by numerous agents. But The Art of Fielding, by first-time author Chad Harbach, is the latest work to capture the dreams and insecurities of provincial America

 The big beasts of US literature – Mailer, Updike, Bellow, Roth – who fought their battles, sometimes physically ("Lost for words again, Norman?" Gore Vidal said after being punched by Mailer) but more usually in intense, convoluted, poetic sentences, are mostly gone now.
Writers such as Franzen have brought in a new style. The highly wrought phrases of the past have given way to stories that run smoothly in front of the eye and which wouldn't have surprised Dickens, looking little further for their depths than in their characters. It is a form of what Zadie Smith, in an essay in the  /New York Review of Books/ about another sporting novel – Joseph O'Neill's  /Netherland/ – referred to as a battle between lyrical realism and the experimental, the struggle between the tradition of Balzac and Flaubert on one side and Kafka and Beckett on the other.
So will  /The Art of Fielding/ live up to the enormous expectations being laid on it? Published in Britain on 19 January, it is sensational and utterly gripping. The  /New York Times/ talks of "a magical, melancholy story about friendship and coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer". The  /New Yorker/ said: "The main order of [Harbach's] business is to entertain" and added, "There's much here to interest readers of the contemporary literary novel, a genre that is clearly a preoccupation of Harbach's."
Whether it is a great American novel is therefore beside the point. It is – if you subscribe to the idea that, of late, the grail has become a genre. "The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected," was Somerset Maugham's droll view on the search. Harbach seems to be laughing at the urge to write it with the device of that statue of Melville, as if to say its shadow is causing him to harbour the same debilitating sense of ambition that brought Henry Skrimshander so low.
What is certain is that when  /The Art of Fielding/ is released here at the end of the month it will be the title most preceded with the phrase, "Have you read?" It's already booked its place on the dinner party bookshelves, among the Murakamis, the McEwans, the Zadie Smiths and the Rushdies. And why not? That's where most authors want and need to be
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