The ReReadables: The Art of Fielding

Welcome to The ReReadables! It's a brand new, occasional series where I'll talk about books I keep coming back to.

Anyone who reads has books that they have read multiple times, but they keep coming back to, like visiting an old friend. I certainly have these. And each time I read them, I find something new to enjoy.

I think having books that you return to over and over is a wonderful thing. And so, in this new series, I want to celebrate them. I'll do one every few weeks or so, and I'd love to hear from you if you have a book that you consider eminently rereadable, too.

First up: The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach. A story about baseball, scholarship, and manly men who like other manly men very, very much.

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The Art of Fielding sounds like the worst idea ever.

It's a novel about a baseball team at a small college in rural Wisconsin. It is long, highly literary, and densely packed with references to everything from Moby Dick to Epictetus. From the outside, it looks like one of those novels that wins an obscure literary prize or two, and then completely vanishes from the public consciousness. And good riddance, because those novels are boring as shit.

I have no idea what attracted me to this book by Chad Harbach. I honestly can't remember. As anyone who has even taken a short glance of my own books will tell you, I am not the type of person to dive deep into Serious Literature all that often.

But for whatever reason, I picked this book up, and since then I have read it perhaps eight or ten times. Once a year, usually in autumn when the summer is starting to fade, I find myself standing in front of it on my bookshelf, quietly ecstatic at the thought of immersing myself once more in this strange, masculine world.

TAOF is, mostly, the story of Henry Skrimshander, a naive but preternaturally gifted baseball player who is recruited to play for Westish College, the aforementioned university in rural Wisconsin. Their team is the Harpooners, named for the college’s (fictional) connection with Herman Melville and Moby Dick. Feel the symbolism!

Putting Henry at shortstop - it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.

But Henry isn't the only character who we get to spend time with. There's Mike Schwartz, an old-before-his-time player/coach who recruits Henry, and has to watch as his protege's career eclipses his own. There’s Guert Affenlight, the college president, a genial, bearded classical scholar who falls for one of Henry's teammates—an intellectually brilliant young man named Owen, about a third of his age. Also in the mix is Guert's daughter, Pella, fresh out of a divorce and looking to restart the college experience she put aside to get married.

When an errant throw from Henry gives Owen a nasty concussion, it sets in motion a chain of events that will change all of their lives.

Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

What could've ended up as dull and pompous is somehow the exact opposite. The world-building on display here is on par with the best of sci-fi and fantasy; not just for the secluded, scholarly world of Westish College, but for the gritty, grimy world its baseball players inhabit.

It's a world of weights and stadium runs, of giant kegs of protein powder with the scoop “half-buried in pallid powder like an abandoned beach toy”. Harbach doesn't bother explaining the arcane and complex baseball jargon—a choice that could have been disastrous but ends up giving the world mystical, pagan overtones.

But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric - not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn't storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football.You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?

Harbach has a huge amount to say about masculinity. Not just its toxic elements—the way it treats competition, how reduces everything to physical strength, the way it treats women. He's also careful to show what masculinity can do when it's harnessed and used for good. And again, I'm just staggered by how accessible it all is. Not just accessible: absorbing. The writing is just beautiful.

Put simply, I should not give this much of a shit about a bunch of college baseball players in Wisconsin. But I do.

TAOF came out in 2011, and was an immediate bestseller. Harbach, a white man, might not reach the same acclaim today. I think if the book were released in 2022, they might be a lot more scrutiny on the racial politics at play. For the record, Harbach’s Westish is a reasonably diverse place, and the fact that he centres a gay relationship, messy though it may be, is heartening. But it sure isn't perfect. Owen—a mixed race character—doesn't get his own point-of-view chapters. All four of the characters who do are white.

I don't think I'm the person to make those particular judgements. What I do know is that against all odds, I find myself preparing to dive back into this world of baseball and academia at least once every year, often without quite understanding why.

You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building a soul-not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those that knew you.

TAOF is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read: an old friend that reveals more and more every time I read it. Serious literature can often be boring as hell...but it can also be truly spectacular.