I have always loved baseball books, and am delighted at the
reprinting of Michael Bishop’s Brittle
Innings by Fairwood Press.
Beautifully packaged and presented, this edition is a worthy addition to
your library if you are fond of historical fiction, fantasy, coming-of-age
tales, and/or baseball.
About baseball: people who malign
the sport for being “slow and boring” do not understand its character. It is a vehicle of lore, a mythic country
where the gods roam the outfield and the legends gather: the colossal home runs
from Ruth to Reggie, the game-winning blasts by Mazeroski, Fisk, and Gibson,
the wounded kings like Tony Conigliaro and Herb Score (figures straight out of
Frazer’s Golden Bough: if you don’t believe me, check the history), the strange
recluses like Koufax and Carlton, alone and retiring (sometimes literally) at
the height of glory. But it is more than
celebrity, than the on-field arête: it is the sandlot game of my childhood,
playing catch with Carl Williams (who was no athlete but was an all-star father),
and brushing against all that continuity and lore.
We have a fine tradition of
baseball novels. Usually the good ones tend
toward the mythic (Malamud’s The Natural,
Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Philip Roth’s
Great American Novel), but these
sometimes fail to capture the feel of the game, its tactile crouch at shortstop,
the smell of neatsfoot oil on a new glove, the leisure of innings in the field. For that, you go to Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly, but when you go
there, you do it at the sacrifice of the mythic undertones and overtones so
wonderful in the other books.
What I guess I’m getting at is the
ambition of Brittle Innings, which tries to do all the things a baseball novel
does and succeeds famously for the most part.
Daniel Boles, our narrator, is
introduced early, but not immediately; we begin with a sportswriter’s search
for Boles, then launch into the focal story.
Fifty pages in, I was wondering why Bishop had begun with a framed narrative,
but you should give baseball novels some slack: their best vehicle is the long,
meandering 19th-century-novel way of telling, and eventually the
book comes around when you merge with the story, then, much later, come to
understand the device at the book’s outset.
At any rate, the book follows Boles
and his mysterious roommate, Jumbo Clerval, through a season in the 1940s
minors, when pro baseball was peopled with athletes who would have never made a
career (minimal though it was) had it not been for much of the talent on the rosters
being deployed to the European and Pacific Theatres of the war. The book unfolds slowly as a kind of
Huck-Finn-meets-Dizzy-Dean account, consistently entertaining and darkening
effectively as the reader begins to realize that there is something about Jumbo
Clerval…
No spoilers here. As a matter of fact, the mid-book revelation
did not surprise me, but I did not care in the least. Brittle
Innings is not so much heart-poundingly plotted as it is slowly unfolding,
an impressive mixture of genre-crossing and simple good read. Buy the ticket, fans: there are box seats here with good views of
both foul poles, and the players are waiting.
Brittle Innings is my pick
this month, just like Rose Streif’s Bearkeeper
was last month out. Get them both.
