The following article is an essay realised as part of a take-home exam for Postromantic Materialism course held at the University of Leuven in 2014-2015. You can find another take home exam about NW by Zadie Smith here.
Facing fallibility in a world of winners:
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
Chad Harbach, The art of fielding
Introduction
The Art of Fielding (2011) is a novel written by Chad Harbach, an American writer who made his debut as a novelist with a book about the life of a 17-year-old baseball player, Henry Skrimshander, and his career as a shortstop in the team of the Westish College, the Harpooners.
The book received a huge approval from the critics and the general public, selling in a few months 250,000 printed copies and soon being introduced in the rankings of the best baseball books of all times. In those charts, it stands next to other important novels which also inspired famous movies: Shoeless Joe (1982) by W. P . Kinsella -and the movie Field of Dreams (1989) with Kevin Costner; A League of Their Own (1992) by Sarah Gilbert -and the movie of the same name with Geena Davis, Tom Hanks and Madonna, just to allude to most famous worldwide.
In the USA, baseball is the “national past-time”. It is not difficult to understand why such novels dedicated to the ball game usually receive a lot of approval by the general public. But The Art of Fielding, even if based on the sport career of the protagonist, is more than that: through the adventures of a baseball team, Harbach manages to really underline and deeply analyze the problems of a teenager who feels below the average of his peers, the importance of team building and self consciousness not only for winning a game or the league, but also personal internal struggle against depression.
An intricate, poised, tingling debut. Harbach’s muscular prose breathes new life into the American past-time, recasts the personal worlds that orbit around it, and leaves you longing, lingering, and a baseball convert long after the last page.[1]
If we look at the narration or the structure of the novel, we do not find anything special or more than the usual structure of a fiction book. The narrator is omniscient, in third person: he knows everything about all characters, but focus especially on the thinking of the protagonists. The author leaves in the shadows only one character, Owen Dunne: the reader can only imagine his thoughts and reactions because the narrator never describes his interiority.
The Art of Fielding is composed of 82 short chapters, each one finishing with a cliffhanger and concerning the stories of other characters not presented in the previous chapter.