Book Review: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date: September 7, 2011
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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.

I picked up The Art of Fielding at a used book sale a couple of years ago because I remembered that there was a lot of buzz around it when it was first published. I love sports movies, e.g. Rudy, Hoosiers, etc. so I figured a novel about baseball would be right up my alley.

Henry Skrimshander comes to Westish College to play baseball. He was the star of his high school team and is the star of the Westish team until a wild throw of his injures somebody. From then on out, he has the yips, i.e. the inability to throw a baseball accurately. This causes a ripple effect through the lives of the other people in his life – his roommate and teammate Owen, his mentor Mike, the school’s president Guert and Guert’s daughter Pella.

I enjoyed the first three-quarters of this book a lot. The author weaves an intricate cloth with all five main characters’ lives. While baseball is definitely part of the story, there’s quite a bit more to it. It’s also about the relationships between the five main characters. It’s hard to go into too much detail without spoilers but I will say that some of the relationships are not healthy.

So that last quarter of the book…it was so out of left-field (pun intended!) that it actually made me a little angry. This book is over 500 pages long so to have invested quite a bit of time in it and for it to have such a disappointing and weird ending was unsatisfying, to say the least. I would give the first three-quarters of this book four stars and the last quarter two stars. Take that for what you will!