Wrapping up my summer reading “project” ….
There a line from one of the earlier episodes of M*A*S*H in which the commanding officer tries to console a doctor who has lost a patient: a good friend who was serving as a war correspondent. “If I had all the answers, I’d be at the Mayo Clinic. Does this look like the Mayo Clinic?”
That struck me as I was thinking about what I wanted to say about The Cactus League, the first novel by Emily Nemens.
I did something I never do when it comes to writing a review: read critiques from other sources, lest I be influenced. But I was curious. And to be honest, they did provide some “Oh, yeah” moments. For example, one reviewer described it as less of a “novel” than a collection of short stories revolving around a common theme. I was wondering about that, why the book split off into disparate ideas, such as a baseball groupie looking for younger players to seduce, reminding me of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham. The hero ballplayer with an addiction problem. The high-draft pick rookie with confidence problems. Then there was the voice of the grizzled old newspaper man, a staple of baseball stories, tying the stories together.
Just as I wonder how qualified editors are to vet the veracity of baseball books — whether fact or fiction — I have similar curiosity about those who review such works. And just as I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to comment on the quality of novels, I have similar notions of critics. Perhaps they’re more invested in the story-telling aspects than whether it makes sense, baseball-wise. Or maybe they’re willing to overlook what they think of as minor details where those of us who do follow the sport might not be as forgiving.
Which is not to say the Nemens, a former editor of the Paris Review, doesn’t know her stuff (some reviews mention her CV almost immediately). She does. And I found The Cactus League pleasant enough, a “page-turner,” as the phrase goes.
But it reminded me a lot of the to-do made when Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding — also a debut novel — came out in 2011. And the reviews for that made me think of the snobby high school cliques that excluded kids who weren’t as rich or good-looking (Harbach is a senior editor of n+1, “a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics”). Maybe it’s because I was always an outsider, but the early notices for TAOF — which I found to be mediocre at best — struck me as being written by the same circle of friends heaping praise on each others’ work.
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