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

[alice wellintown]

> 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.

If this battle is American, a civil strife over the great American
Novel whatever that may be,  why must its cannons fire from the
continent? I understand the Europeans cast this struggle with Flaubert
on one side and Kafka on the other, but Melville's battle piece or
Poe's might be better placed on the field if the theater is, as the
reviewer seems to claim, an American one, and on the other side would
we find James.