Before and after the novel
The author is a graduate from the Master of Fine Arts from University of Virginia and he struggled many years just not to starve. Harbach worked on the novel for nine years, making a living with temporary jobs in order to write The Art of Fielding.
As Zeitchik writes, Charbach’s novel features “some pretty ambitious literary writing, a prominent gay character and a baseball motif, all no-nos for anyone with aspirations to the fiction bestseller list”[2]. After ten years, what seemed like a normal novel became a piece of literature able to raise the interest of editors. The fortune of this novel came totally unexpected, after almost ten years of working:
“It’s a huge contrast, and I’m not sure I was really ready for it,” Harbach said. […] “When I was writing all those years, I spent all this time thinking about something that you literally can’t talk about with anyone; no one wants to go through the intricate crises you’re going through writing a book. And then it all changes, and that’s all anyone wants to talk about.”[3]
Prior to publication, the book was given a lot of publicity and money investment, something unexpected for a first-time novelist as Chad Harbach was. An auction was prepared to win the publication rights of the novel and it was won by Little, Brown and Company for 665,000$[4]. Published in September 2011, the book was presented also with blurbs by Jonathan Franzen.
It has left a little hole in my life the way a really god book will.
Reading The Art of Fielding is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop: you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors. First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom.[5]
Why baseball?
When we consider major American literature of the late 20th century, we have in mind the Beat Generation, Hemingway, Kerouac, and for the 21st century some of the most successful writers are Franzen and Foster Wallace. These two centuries are characterized by a deep change in the American society, which becomes more and more aware of its fallibility and fragility. Throughout the years, the Americans begun to identify themselves in a sport which outside USA’s borders is often considered difficult to understand and boring: baseball. The national past-time is always considered not only as a sport, but mainly as a religion and a way of conceiving life.
Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. […] You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?[6]
One man stands alone against nine people, one team, and often succeeds in beating them all alone.
[The Art of Fielding is] A wonderful book heading from baseball to narrate the America of these days, temporary and experimental. In facts, baseball isn’t only a national sport: a powerful summoning during summer, a familiar ritual and a collective mantra, a laic and gastronomic Mass. It’s an existential sport. A sport made of waiting, precise gestures, irreparable movements, numbers and technique: precisely as life is.[7]
The book seems to be built as a real baseball game. It is long, at times so much that it seems almost apathetic, far away from the “happy ending” we could imagine. This boredom is symmetrical to what happens in a ball game at the middle of a game, and also to what happens to the major characters (we will analyze this point later on). During equal baseball matches, the game usually presents a tight result and the solution of a tie is always on the errors of one of the team, usually at the half of the game, during the 5th inning. The 5th inning of The Art of Fielding is represented by the central part, when Henry goes through a worrisome depression after realizing that is not able to manage is failure in sports, the only field he felt capable of doing something great. At this point, the narration becomes very slow, focusing on the period in which Henry leaves Westish college and resigns from the baseball team, incapable to react against his fallibility.