He [Henry] thought of the Odyssey, which he’d half read in Professor Eglantine’s class—Ulysses trapped on Calypso’s island, wasting time, but he was no Ulysses, had no Ithaca to get home to, even though his beard had come in darker and fuller than he’d expected, a harsh brown beard that after a month or two would be the sort you might see on a statue of Ulysses, or that you did see on the statue of Melville that stood in the corner of the Small Quad, peering out to sea.[8]
Mike considers his baseball world easier to live than the real, non-baseball world:
Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words[9].
Thanks to Mr. Affenlight, this 5th inning irresolution is interrupted and Henry, together with all the other characters, can finally move on to the resignation of personal and group failure, making possible an unexpected victory of the final game.
A bildungsromance for every age
Henry is not the only one who has to understand that the human nature is made of mistake: all characters at some point confront themselves with something unexpected and sometimes hurtful. Many of the novel’s reader[10], above all the ones from outside the USA and not familiar with the game of baseball, found the novel absorbing even leaving apart the baseball thematic. Some book reviewers address this feature of the novel to the capacity of the writer to exactly describe the feelings of the fictitious characters, men, woman, old or young. Everything seems to run to the same point: even if we seem successful from the outside, nobody knows how tough could be our inner struggles.
Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.[11]
Henry is not alone in his struggle to grow and accept all his failures. Mike and Pella accompany him, even if before their first meeting are living completely different lives. Mike is living his college life in accordance with the stereotypes, but always trying to make his mind stronger than his body. Pella is recovering from an early marriage, already failed, and is trying to accept the absence of her father and his homosexuality.
Guert Affenlight is a developing character too: we first know him from his past academic and personal experiences, than as a liberal president at Westish college. The affair with Owen is not as plain as he would like, and the reader can feel the struggle going on in his interiority.
Readers of all ages can empathize with different characters, all going through the same journey: knowing themselves and looking for their spot in the world.
The charachters: Henry Skrimshander
Henry is the center of the story, the most controversial character. He is so shy and close in himself that he may seem an empty shell, without personality. Actually, the purpose of the author is to delineate a reserved, insecure guy who can only express himself through baseball.
The first encounter the reader has with Henry Skrimshander is from the point of view of another major character, Mike Schwartz.
Schwartz didn’t notice the kid during the game. Or rather, he noticed only what everyone else did—that he was the smallest player on the field, a scrawny novelty of a shortstop, quick of foot but weak with the bat. Only after the game ended, when the kid returned to the sun-scorched diamond to take extra grounders, did Schwartz see the grace that shaped Henry’s every move.[12]
The two guys were together at a baseball tournament in Peoria, Arizona. Schwartz was impressed not only by the skills of the player, but also by his face without any expression. “Where the kid’s thoughts were—whether he was having any thoughts at all, behind that blank look—Schwartz couldn’t say. He remembered a line from Professor Eglantine’s poetry class: Expressionless, expresses God“.[13] Normally, Schwartz would have felt some kind of envy for that prodigious player. For himself too is surprising that he is not envious of that unknown kid, but more desirous to do not let that talent escape from his own sight. “All his life Schwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent, some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that he’d seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn’t let it walk away”[14].