Chad Harbach’s book The Art of Fielding is not only a wonderful baseball novel — it zooms immediately into the pantheon of classics … Mr. Harbach has the rare abilities to write with earnest, deeply felt emotion without ever veering into sentimentality, and to create quirky, vulnerable and fully imagined characters who instantly take up residence in our own hearts and minds … Mr. Harbach skillfully constructs a story with startling depth of field. Although his novel is strewn with literary allusions, it wears its literary borrowings lightly, focusing instead on the inner lives of its characters … What makes The Art of Fielding so affecting is that it captures these people at that tipping point in their lives when their dreams, seemingly within reach, suddenly lurch out of their grasp (perhaps temporarily, perhaps forever), reminding them of their limitations and the random workings of fate.
To defenders of baseball and literary fiction, the charges against each are familiar, and overlapping: too slow, too precious, not enough action...Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel … If it seems a stretch for a baseball novel to hold truth and beauty and the entire human condition in its mitt, well, The Art of Fielding isn’t really a baseball novel at all, or not only. It’s also a campus novel and a bromance (and for that matter a full-fledged gay romance), a comedy of manners and a tragicomedy of errors … Henry’s crisis is precipitated by overanalysis — he’s paralyzed by thought, by an inability to simply act (or react). This is credible from a sports point of view, and fraught with significance from a literary one...Harbach’s achievement is to transfer the thinking man’s paralysis to the field of play, where every hesitation is amplified and every error judged by an exacting, bloodthirsty audience.
Perhaps the most unusual feature of this unusually charming début is the easy, unpretentious way it has of joining a love of baseball with a love of literature … The central drama of becoming arises from a wildly errant throw by Henry, which injures a teammate and seems to dissolve Henry’s confidence. He is suddenly incapable of throwing accurately, undermined by paralytic self-consciousness, or, Harbach seems to be arguing, by the onset of adulthood itself … The main order of business here is to entertain, and in this Harbach succeeds. His prose, furthermore, is uncommonly resourceful … The dream of perfection deferred allows Harbach to tell a story about our national pastime that manages, as well, to be about our historical present—in other words, a story about fallibility.
While [Keith] Gessen is wrong about its being ‘impossible to dislike,’ it’s not terrible either. The vaunted first pages are well done, with an undeniable flair for sportswriting...One reason this opener works so well is that the prodigy is seen by an observer, from a distance. Unfortunately, the young man ceases to be an enigma even before the page numbers get into double digits … Harbach seems content keeping us just this side of seriousness, so that reading his novel through is like submitting to a long and almost imperceptibly light tickling … People used to expect literary novels to deepen the experience of living; now they are happy with any sustained display of writerly cleverness. But The Art of Fielding falls short of this new standard too.
Chad Harbach’s highly entertaining, intermittently excellent, unapologetically masculine The Art of Fielding [is] a telephone directory of a novel about scrappy underdogs trying to win it all … The book is a throwback to a bygone, if not universally mourned era when charismatic white male novelists wrote intelligent bestsellers, and one senses that it is intentionally so … Harbach is a solid writer, inoffensively funny, pretty good at character, a prodigy at suspense. The book’s great success, though, is its charm: its eagerness to please, its casual, wholesome seductiveness. Despite predictability in the plot and lapses in the writing, it’s the charm that keeps one going … But it could have been better... Instead, Harbach is too much like the Henry of Chapter 1, ‘bland, almost bored, like … a virtuoso practising scales’.
Whether a baseball novel, a schoolboy novel, or a campus novel, this is a surprisingly sunny story, with the sweetness of tone and conformity to the rules of genre one associates more with juvenile sports fiction. Henry is the proverbial ‘natural’ … Whether all this innocence and good will and coming of age can hold our attention depends on the powers of the novelist, of course, and there Harbach shows real talent...Harbach writes with a gentle but acute intelligence … Perhaps Harbach wants to show us the good in the things we're letting slip away.
A good baseball coach and a good novelist are a lot alike, according to Chad Harbach's satisfyingly old-fashioned debut, The Art of Fielding … The characters in The Art of Fielding do suffer. They lose jobs, marriages, ballgames. They see their futures snatched away without explanation, and hurt each other without justification. But Harbach is such an empathetic writer — such a good coach — that Schwartz and his teammates suffer in ways suited to them, and feel as smart and human and real as a reader could hope for … Harbach's novel might remind you not of the highbrow writers one associates with n+1 but of John Irving's The World According to Garp in its length, its warmth, its love of sudsy plot twists.
It's a baseball novel, meaning it's a novel from which one can extrapolate about all life on earth. It's a college novel and thus a coming of age novel. It's a novel about families, by birth and by life-choices, and a novel about how to live, how to love and how to die. It's a novel about how to read and how to write, and it's all in all the most delightful and serious first book of fiction that I have read in a while … The loves, friendships, duties and betrayals, both of self and others, drive a clear and appealing plot.
Instead of focusing on runs and hits, Harbach is most concerned with errors, that cruel statistic line unique to baseball that no one, not even an athlete touched by natural greatness, can ever eliminate. The issue for Henry, and the characters around him, is how recovery from these errors on and off the field gives shape to people's lives … Before too many sports clichés can take root, the novel brushes aside Henry's rise from lanky prodigy to big league prospect and instead shares focus on those surrounding his development … Harbach deftly ratchets up the drama as Henry spends much of the book battling a wrenching string of errors.
[Harbach] has crafted a world that manages to be both familiar and unique … The Art of Fielding does not limit itself to being a ‘baseball book’ or a collegiate bildungsroman … While Harbach has received due praise for writing a novel that explores the nuances of male relationships, it is the character of Pella who ties the novel together … The men in the novel must first realize they are fallible and then confront those failures. Henry loses the ability to throw a baseball accurately and comes to understand that striving for perfection in a game where even the best hitters are successful only three times out of ten is flawed ambition.
Unlike so many young writers, who herald the loser as a kind of everyman, this is a book full of winners. Who are losing. Baseball stars, sought-after academics, beautiful young women and talented students all fall flat on their face across this novel. And bless him, Harbach doesn't indulge an ounce of schadenfreude … One-by-one this book's entire cast suffers some setback or another, and Harbach shows them doing that most American thing: Improvising … This is an absorbing and autumnal novel set in a place — the academy — and about a game — baseball — that have both been written to death. That Harbach makes it feel brand new feels like talent.
Debut novelist Chad Harbach does not merely echo Moby Dick. In at least one respect, he goes Mr. Melville one better … Though there’s plenty of baseball in The Art of Fielding, Harbach’s novel is no more about the game than Moby Dick is about whaling … The invocations of Melville’s ambition and achievement are lightened by the fun Harbach has with his characters, at least when they’re not in peril … At his best, Harbach energetically propels varied characters through a rambling story that is entertaining in part because the author himself often doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously.
As in a great baseball game, in which individual plays prove to be far more memorable than the final score, The Art of Fielding is less noteworthy as a showcase for its perfectly serviceable, if somewhat schematic, plot than for Harbach's mad skills, his humor and above all, the humanity with which the author infuses each of his characters … The author's observations about baseball can be both pithy and witty … The parallels that Harbach frequently draws between the art of creating literature and that of mastering the game of baseball are wonderfully insightful. And the writing throughout, as Walt Whitman once said of the game itself, is glorious.
