Category Archives: new fiction

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach’s debut is a big, fun novel about baseball and the growing up we do in college. At its core is a buddy novel between Henry Skrimshander, star shortstop, and his mentor Schwartz, captain of the baseball team at Westish College, a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin.

In the opening, Schwartz recruits Henry and takes him under his wing so that three years later, the boys are best friends, the team is having a championship season, and scouts are considering Henry for the big leagues. Of course, trouble ensues as the story opens up to focus on the college president, Guert Affenlight, his daughter, and Henry’s gay roommate.

With its sprawling cast of characters and 500+ pages, the novel has been marketed as the next Great American Novel, and perhaps no recent novel save Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was as highly anticipated. Last October, Vanity Fair ran a long piece about Harbach’s path to publication, which involved 10 years of copyediting in New York and keeping the bill collectors at bay, followed by a half-million dollar advance, editing by the guy who edited Hemingway’s posthumous works, and global fame and fortune.

Harbach himself wrote a telling essay for Slate, “MFA vs. NYC,” which set off a firestorm among at least the MFA crowd of writers. In the essay, Harbach argued that there are two distinct literary cultures in America today: the MFA culture, which centers around the workshop, emphasizes the high-brow short story, and trains future writing instructors; and the New York City culture, which centers around publishing parties, emphasizes the middlebrow novel, and aims for fame and fortune.

No reductionist argument is completely fair to either side, but it’s hard to consider Harbach’s novel without also considering the system surrounding its publication. I think he sees himself in the NYC culture, and his novel definitely appeals to the wide middle—almost to a fault.

While I enjoyed reading it, and while the characters feel real and fully developed, it doesn’t have the larger stakes that a novel like Freedom has. Whereas the War on Terror and the Bush administration’s appropriation of the word “freedom” underlie Franzen’s latest novel, the closest Harbach gets to cultural commentary is two players arguing in the locker room: “Israel!” “Palestine!” “Israel!” “Palestine!”

This isn’t to say the book needed to be more political, just that it lacked a kind of breadth I found in the Franzen. The Art of Fielding has more in common with Michael Chabon’s exuberant yet cloistered first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—a good book (especially for an English major) but maybe not the Great American Novel reviewers would have you believe. (Whether the Great American Novel is still possible, or ever existed to begin with, is a different discussion for a different day.)

Nic Pizzolatto, Galveston

This is a quick, fun, hard-boiled novel about a dude, Roy Cady, who works as some hired muscle for some gangster-types in New Orleans. When his boss tries to have him killed, Cady hits the road with this 18-year-old would-be prostitute he saved from some hitmen. They cruise west into Texas to hide out, but the danger is only a few steps behind them. You can read this novel in an afternoon, so I’m not sure I’d pay the $25 for the hardcover edition, but it’s definitely worth checking out of the library if you like this kind of narrative — gruesome, masculine, punchy noir. I’d also check out Dennis Lehane’s review in the NY Times, because he has some interesting comments about the genre. (Might not want to read the review until you’ve read the novel, because there’s only so much you can say without spoiling everything.)

October and November reading

Slow going on the novel revisions, but I do have a handful of book recommendations:

  • Robert Morgan, The Balm of Gilead Tree. Morgan is an elder statesman of Appalachian literature, and this book of his selected stories is excellent. Set in the Green Valley near Hendersonville, N.C., the stories move chronologically from the 17th century and the arrival of the white man to present day (or at least the late ’90s). I particularly enjoyed “Poinsett’s Bridge,” which is about a stonemason working on a bridge to connect the Piedmont to the mountains; “Kuykendall’s Gold,” which is about a young woman who marries and old man who has gold buried in his woods; “Dark Corner,” which is about an impoverished family on the road; and “The Welcome,” which is about a soldier returning from WWII and is reminiscent of Hemingway’s “A Soldier’s Story.” Overall, the collection is a good example of a writer plumbing deep into a setting, and the way Morgan explores history should offer an explosion of creativity to any aspiring writer.
  • Patricia Engel, Vida. This is an excellent first collection of stories from a young writer I met in Key West. The stories are linked by a common protagonist, Sabina, a Colombian-American living in New Jersey and who migrates to New York City and then to Florida. The stories have a funny, sharp voice along the lines of Junot Diaz, though I think the subject matter is a bit more bold — a young woman confronted with love, death, terrorism, and ennui — all presented in a wry, unsentimental voice. The line that won me over came early: “around here, they card you to buy smokes and nobody has the nerve to break any kind of rules. It’s a town full of wusses, a polo-shirt army of numbnuts.”
  • Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Franklin’s new one is a contemporary murder mystery set in rural Mississippi. It’s a quick read and a great study in plotting. Looking back on it, I do think the plot is a bit too neat, the characters not quite as deep as in Hell at the Breech or the novella “Poachers,” but it’s still a good read and a must for southern bibliophiles. I’ve got a review coming out in the newspaper in a couple of weeks, which I’ll link to.

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

Finally ready to make some commentary about this book, though it seems everyone in the media has already weighed in. Based on the news, either this book is the salvation of the novel or Franzen is an idiot. Or both. Or maybe all novelists are idiots. Whatever the case, here are my general thoughts:

  • This is a wildly ambitious book; the characters are well and, for the most part, charitably drawn; the themes tap into the zeitgeist of the late aughts; and the story is memorable. Whoever said Franzen writes as though no one told him the novel was dead is correct. You have to admire the scope of Freedom.
  • That said, I think I liked The Corrections better, and I’m not sure this book would have gotten such press if it wasn’t the follow-up and if it hadn’t taken Franzen nine years. Everyone loves a decade-long masterpiece, right?
  • I raced through 300 pages in a day and a half, then put it down for two weeks to read other books without really missing it, then raced through the second half in a day and a half. Compelling when you’re in it, though not as compelling afterward?
  • I’m not sure the ambition was fully realized. There’s a subplot about the main guy, Walter, being involved in a bird sanctuary, and another subplot about his son selling bad truck parts to the U.S. government for the Iraq war. These subplots tap into the political climate, but they got tedious and I feel like they covered old ground. We’re inundated with this news, so it’s kind of stale to rehash certain bits of recent history in fiction.
  • I’m reminded of Roth’s American Pastoral and Irving’s The World According to Garp. All three novels have an ambitious scope, and all three are character-driven. This kind of story seems hardest to pull off because, unlike a quiet character story, you have big political plots, but unlike plot-driven stories the rhythm of the narration moves all over the place, in and out of time and place and different characters’ psyches.
  • I really wish Franzen were better in interviews because he comes off sounding like a pompous windbag. This book has a satiric bite to it, but it’s no more vicious than anything in Sinclair Lewis or John Cheever. There’s nothing new about Franzen’s discomfort with the bourgeoisie, and I’m not sure it’s fair to gripe about his politics. In his interviews, however, he doesn’t come off sounding so good, and does his book a disservice. I read The Corrections knowing nothing about him, and loved it, but if I hadn’t read it and had to judge him based on recent media coverage, I wouldn’t have bothered with Freedom.
  • Still, it’s well worth reading, and if you think you’ll like it, you probably will.

Steve Yarbrough, Safe from the Neighbors

What it is:

Yarbrough’s newest novel is about Luke May, a high school history teacher whose childhood acquaintance moves back to town, and she stirs up old memories of violence in the ’60s and creates a spell of trouble for Luke in the present. Set in the fictional Loring, Miss., home of Yarbrough’s other novels, Safe from the Neighbors confronts small-town gossip and racial violence in the Mississippi delta.

Why it’s interesting:

I think this is Yarbrough’s first novel in the first-person POV, and the form works really well for him. All the work I’ve read of his deals with the interplay between past trauma and present tension, and the first-person voice allows Yarbrough to move seamlessly between then and now.  I’ve always enjoyed Yarbrough’s work, but this is far and away my favorite , because in addition to providing his usual texture of small-town life, and the tensions between white and black and rich and poor, this novel contains his most confident voice, and the narrative sucks you in and pulls you through. I would have read it in one sitting if I didn’t have a job, and even then I was a little late coming back from lunch two days in a row because I didn’t want to put the book down.

Further Reading:

If you haven’t read Yarbrough’s work, this is a great novel to start with. I’d also recommend The Oxygen Man for the way it captures the texture of the Mississippi delta.  The only other book I can think to compare Safe from the Neighbors to is Ron Rash’s Saints at the River. Both novels have a narrator concerned with facts (a history teacher in Yarbrough’s, a reporter in Rash’s), and both deal with the interplay of past and present. But the novels actually tell somewhat opposing stories: Yarbrough’s is “a stranger comes to town,” and Rash’s is “you can’t go home again.”

Ian McEwan, Solar

What it is: 

McEwan’s new novel is about a physicist, Michael Beard, a short, fat, balding narcissist who, for lack of anything better to do, gets involved with clean energy research. Broken into three sections – 2000, 2005, 2009 – the novel also follows his various relationships. He’s a philanderer, and his fifth marriage is ending in part 1, accompanied by all sorts of drama and sporadic violence.

Why it’s interesting:

I didn’t care for this one, and am going to spoil the entire plot with this paragraph. In part 1, Beard’s wife is having a vengeful affair with a builder, then another affair with one of Beard’s post-doc researchers. The builder has a temper, and Beard doesn’t know about the second affair until he comes home and finds the kid in his house. They converse, and the kid slips on a rug, lands on a glass table, and dies. Beard frames the builder, who takes the fall for murder. Part 1 is actually kind of compelling, even though the protagonist is fairly miserable. Part 2 is boring. In Part 3, Beard has used some of that post-doc’s notes to create a new kind of solar cell, and he gets caught sued by the British government for fraud, and ends the book in debt for several million dollars and likely on his way to jail. I guess it’s a comeuppance, but though I didn’t care for Beard throughout I also didn’t feel any kind of justice for the comeuppance. In fact, I’m not sure when the last time I read such a well-written novel that left me so utterly cold.

Further Reading: 

McEwan seems to be hit or miss. If you were only going to read one book by him, it would have to be Atonement, though he has a few others that I enjoyed, though I’m beginning to wonder if he’s one of those authors I think I like more than I do.