Art done by Keith Hayes
The Art of Fielding - Review
Link to the author's (C. Harbach) personal website
Genre: Fiction
Publication Type: Book
Tags:
- Average Age of Main Characters (21)
- Length (5 / 10)
Link to Goodreads
Blurb: At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.
Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.
As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment - to oneself and to others.
Review: Fucking phenomenal. This book was a pretty large influence for me in my early twenties, and it's one of the ones that have stuck with me. I'm a bit unsure if the blurb does it justice despite it being completely accurate, so if you're on the fence from reading it then take this as the shove to go and read the book. So what makes this so phenomenal? Simply a solid story, beautiful writing, and some tweaks of absolute originality. I mention these tweaks because at-least for me, other books with a semi-similar setting (university based with a focus on mental health) are more formulaic, and don't manage to tie in 'lesser' characters as well during down episodes. That's truly an aside though, and this a big recommend because of the story and the writing style. It simply works, with the five characters mentioned in the blurb balanced extremely well. I never found myself wanting to hurry through any of their individual arcs, and I loved the design in how they tie together while being sufficiently independent. I genuinely have had to refrain myself from mentioning how much I enjoyed reading Henry's story, because then I would be doing a disservice to Mike, so I'm just adding this sentence so their names are mentioned.... This is a great break from fantasy, especially so if you're in the 19-25 range, massive recommend.