Mike Schwartz
Captain of the football team and one of the strongest player of the baseball team, Mike Schwartz seems the typical successful guy, but the reader soon understands that he is exactly the opposite. He attends college and wants to go to law school, but his economical problems and lack of self-esteem soon become for him the major obstacles to face.
His world would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He’d never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he’d never be as good as he wanted to be. He’d never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn’t double-edged, that couldn’t just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing, and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around; this was his only skill[25].
He is always concerned about other people and their well-being. Above all Henry is capable to do not let him sleep to find a solution for his depression, but always coming from himself and not from the outside.
“Would it upset you,” Pella said, “if Henry saw a shrink and it helped?” “What kind of question is that?” “You can’t be afraid that it won’t help—that would be absurd, because nothing else is helping. You’re afraid that it will help. What scares you is that he’ll get drafted and go pro and be fine. Better than fine. He’ll be happy as a clam and he won’t need you anymore. But as long as he’s at Westish, as long as he’s a mess, then you’re still running the show.”[26]
Even when Mike discovers that Pella and Henry had a relationship, he is not able to get made and instead seems pleased that finally they have found the solution to make Henry recover from his depression. This reaction could seem ironic, but love and girfriends really do not seem the cause of the broken friendship between Mike and Henry.
Relaxing and enjoying successes is impossible for him, always being vigilant not to fail, but obtaining exactly the opposite.
Even in the best circumstances his enjoyment of moments like this was bound to be partial, muted, hedged; […] It was a coach’s mentality, a field general’s mentality, and it was his mentality too. Permanent vigilance, because disaster always lurked. […] All he could have today was a sickly champagne-and-Percocet high, and the knowledge that there’d be at least two more games—because nationals were double elimination—before he had to face his fucked-up life.[27]
Mike’s personal problems -with money, his future at university and with Pella- and with the baseball team result in very painful moments after training and games, leading him to an addiction to painkillers.
He is probably the best outlined character, with a good balance between strength and insecurity. He is the only mentor of Henry, but with whom he never has a real confrontation after Henry’s depression. This is probably an author’s choice: Henry’s depression is developing while all the people around able feel unable to act, even when Henry’s bad moment seems to have come to an end.
Pella Affenlight
Pella is the daughter of Guert Affenlight, the only female character of the novel. She is an intelligent woman, of the same age of the other characters, but with a difficult past. She lost her mother when she was young and soon became “a rebel”, trying to follow what her father did but doing exactly the opposite. In her senior year she was accepted to Yale -while her father taught in Harvard- but finds this university too mainstream and decides not to go there and escape and marry David, but they soon break up. So Pella comes back with her father and starts to go out with Mike Schwartz. Such condition gives her a lot to think about.
Pella felt, again, both older and younger than the situation required. She’d skipped this whole era of roommates and beer pong and Salvation Army furniture—it wasn’t necessarily something you wanted to go back to once you’d lived in a clean decorated place of your own.[28]
She seems unable to let her past go away, for example when she informs Mike that her husband David is coming to visit her to plan the details of the closure of their marriage, she is not able to call him “ex-husband”. While David and her out for dinner, she acquires a really immature behavior, ingesting some earring he gave her as a gift for forgiveness. Instead, when she discovers the affair between his father and Owen, she just tries to make sure it exists and speaks with her father about how dangerous this relationship could be. “Well, great,” Pella said. “Amor vincit omnia.” What she was thinking was even crueler: He’s going to break your heart”[29].
Almost unexpectedly, the reader sees Pella’s changing behaviour towards MIke, accepting to help Henry in her own way -at first sleeping with him, than accepting him in her house and taking care of him as a mother would do. She is also worried about her father’s relationship being discovered by other students and so she tries to avoid contacts with her father in her house, even at the phone. After her father’s death, she is able to finally accept her condition of trying to be a free woman, but depending on man. We never see her on her own as she is always accompanied by someone -Mike, Henry, David, her father- maybe denoting her fear to be left alone.
Guert Affenlight
The first contact the reader has with Guert Affenlight is in chapter six, when the narrator remembers his past as an undergraduate student at Westish College, when he discovered some handwritings by Herman Melville. He handled the manuscripts to the director of the university, who used them for publications and personal prosperity without mentioning Affenlight in any situation. In exchange of never reavealing what happened, Affenlight obtained the possibility to attend Harvard’s doctoral program in History of American Civilization, deepening his love for Herman Melville’s literature. After a successful dissertation thesis, he suddenly became father and had to take care of her daughter, Pella, whose mother died in Africa during an expedition in Africa. Throughout his life, her daughter Pella will always be a worry for him: he feels that he does not have a real relationship with her and always tries to have her next to him, to start again to be a father without regrets.
Coming back to the days in which the narration takes place, we start discovering that sixty-year-old president Affenlight has an interest for one of his students: “Really, he’d been working closely with one student group. Okay, really he’d been working closely with one student—the same student he wanted desperately to get down to the baseball diamond to see”[30].
President Affenlight is also at the center of the pederast plot in The Art of Fielding: he maintains a secret relationship with Owen Dunne, non only erotic but what truly seems love: “No wonder he’d finally fallen in love—now that he had so little warmth of his own left to give”[31]. In chapter 32, the narrator describes the moments after what we suppose to be the first time Guert Affenlight and Owen have made love. Guert seems much more insecure than Owen, clearly not at his first homesexual experience. Even if warned by his daughter, the love for Owen is uncovered, leading Mr. Affenlight to his possible resignation as president of Westish College, but this news seems not to bother him a lot: ” He’d done so many rash things—he’d forgotten himself and his position. Visiting Owen’s dorm, going with Owen to a motel—they were the crimes of a careless, foolish man. And he’d done them with all his heart”[32]. His main concern is: would have been the same if Owen was a girl?
After all this problems coming out, he goes to Henry’s room to give him the ticket to fly to the national finals of baseball, where the Harpooners are playing. He then leaves the action of the novel in a low profile: his sudden death does not cause any tear-jerking scene, always maintaining a low profile, as he had as president of Westish college and as a caring father and lover.
Owen Dunne
Henry’s roommate is the most undiscovered character. The narrator never tells his thoughts and the reader knows something about his personality only through the relationships and behaviour he has with other people. For example, Henry meets Owen for the first time in their communal room, while Owen is cleaning the communal bathroom. Owen is not ashamed of being with his lover Jason in his room, and neither to read books while attending baseball game as a player. Because of this conduct in the baseball field during games, his teammates gave him the nickname of “Buddha”.
When the relationship with Mr. Affenlight begins, he shows a lot of security, not being afraid of telling his mature lover what he really thinks of the relationships, so influenced by moral and social restrictions to condition the whole affair. At times, he seems even more mature than Affenlight: for example, he asks Owen pieces of advice on buying or not a house. He seems also a bit uninterested a times, because he always talks about environmental problems while he is with Affenlight in intimacy.
Owen seems the “glue” between the characters, even if he is the least described personality. With his colleagues and president he is always ironic, impassive, but sometimes too close to the idea of a “sensitive and educated gay” who can remember us the figure of the dandy in the English Literature.