Still looking for the great American baseball novel?

Ron, I picked up your comment about “The Natural” and I appreciate your tracking the essay here. It’s important to note that I’ve not read every baseball novel, and so I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge. But I have read many of them. As the essay indicates, reading “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach started me on the recent quest to compare a quality current baseball novel with the seminal work by Malamud some 60 years earlier.

I certainly make allowances for the different eras, and I don’t think my criticism of “The Natural” stems from considering that novel to be an anachronism. To the contrary, the nostalgic, period charm lends weight to the novel today. What’s not so natural — witness my reference to stock characters — is Malamud’s delivery of the supporting cast: such characters as Bump Baily, the boorish slugger, and Otto Zipp, the obnoxious dwarf in the stands. Roy Hobbs is on a odyssey where all the fates are against him and so much of the book seems all archetypes and prototypes — heady stuff if one wants to pursue literary connections in obvious places. When Iris helps bring the Hobbs whammy to an end by rising in her red dress in the stands, the obvious archetypes continue. Hobbs’ lake tryst with Iris does bring the book a rare interlude of warmth, but as Kevin Baker writes in a 2003 introduction to “The Natural”: “It is hard to find a truly likable charter in the book. … Women are depicted as symbols of danger, or of deceit, or of simplistic purity to the point of misogyny. Men are almost as bad. …”

And so Baker, who nevertheless heaps high praise on “The Natural,” doesn’t disagree with the description of stock characters. For him, though, they’re compelling figures in a tragic twist on the formulaic, upbeat sports schlock fiction of Malamud’s day. Here, Baker is correct: “The Natural” is an original. I simply find it a good, somewhat wooden baseball novel — not a great one.

Flash forward to Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding.” I’d place it somewhere between “The Natural” and “The Might Have Been,” both in terms of literary aim and accomplishment. Some have criticized the impenetrable Henry Skrimshander, slick-fielding college shortsop, as a one-note protagonist, when in fact he’s but part of a crew in an ensemble campus cast. Harbach wears his literary aims on his sleeve, to some degree, in that the college president made his name through Melville scholarship and there’s a statue of Herman Melville on the lakeside campus of Westish College in Wisconsin. Among my favorites lines in the novel is one that compares the state of Wisconsin to a baseball glove: brilliant — I’d never noticed it before, but I saw it at once.

As Harbach tells The Paris Review, “‘The Art of Fielding’ is in large part a book about the varieties of male friendship, from the antagonistic and the competitive to the deeply affectionate and the frankly sexual, and so ‘Moby Dick,’ taking place as it does in a very intense world of very intense men, seemed like the ideal analogue.”

And so catcher Mike Schwartz — not Henry Skrimshander, not President Guert Affenlight and certainly not the invisible college baseball coach (one of the novel’s greatest weaknesses) — is Harbach’s Captain Ahab, as it were, leading the Harpooners on a nomadic quest for a championship. The male bonding does place undue pressure on the presidential daughter, Pella Affenlight, to carry the distaff load through much of the book, though Henry’s gay mulatto roommate Owen Dunne — with a disposition that lives up to his “Buddha” nickname — throws the two biggest curves offered in the plot. Ultimately, “The Art of Fielding” is an accomplished work that is part baseball novel, part academic novel, which left me somewhat stumped about its place in the pantheon of baseball fiction.

In part, that’s why the discovery of “The Might Have Been” served up a sense of wonder to me after reading the other novels. Here was a wise, intelligent novel with no overt literary aims screaming to be heard or lurking to be found in the shadows. Like the previous two authors, Joseph Schuster penned his baseball work as a debut novelist who happens to be a seasoned academician. Also like Malamud and Harbach, Schuster displays an affection for the game that seems to summon a truly dedicated effort from all three writers to produce a memorable work.

What separates Schuster as superior is an utter mastery of characters. We hover closer to the heart of his protagonist, Edward Everett Yates, than to anyone in “The Natural” or “The Art of Fielding.” The side characters and odd foils of “The Might Have Been” are marvelous — a Montreal lover, at the end of Edward Everett’s brief Major League career, who as a jilted society femme fatale is vastly more interesting than her counterpart in “The Natural”; a clever uncle who attempts to guide Edward Everett through the signposts of agricultural sales in the Midwest, when the protagonist briefly flirts with a non-baseball career; the pathetic wife and children of a hard-luck infielder who plays for Edward Everett, the minor league manager; and Meg, a sensible, middle-aged romantic interest from Edward Everett’s later years who surprises him with … well, we’ll let you discover more by reading “The Might Have Been” yourself.

Ultimately, “The Might Have Been” struck me the way Jon Hassler struck a New York Times book critic years ago: “Joseph Schuster is a writer good enough to restore your faith in fiction.”