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Loading... The Art of Fielding: A Novel (original 2011; edition 2011)by Chad Harbach
Work detailsThe Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach (2011)
A great tribute to American Universities, Baseball, American Literature (especially Melville), and the ole' boys' club. (  ) EricFitz08 | Apr 27, 2013 |  fiction, baseball, (  ) fieldsli | Apr 26, 2013 | An enjoyable story which takes place on a college campus. The writing is definitely an homage to John Irving even down to a character named Owen. (  ) tangledthread | Apr 26, 2013 | As a Brit, I know nothing about baseball other than it is like rounders played by bigger men who chew tobacco and spit alot! However, this novel held my attention and I learnt a fair bit about the game and the training that goes into making a good player. The characters are well drawn, although I didn't find myself warming to the main character Henry who is somewhat monosylibic and does not seem to have a ny redeeming traits. It is a longish book, but never felt too long. As some other reviewers have mentioned, there are one or two odd plot moments, including the ending, but overall, a good enjoyable read ( ) PIER50 | Apr 25, 2013 | Abandoned for now. But I plan to come back to it! It was just so long, and I had a few other books that drew my attention first.... I'll come back to it! KristySP | Apr 21, 2013 |
 The book is a throwback to a bygone, if not universally mourned era when charismatic white male novelists wrote intelligent bestsellers, and one senses that it is intentionally so....It is a work of stridently unexperimental psychological realism, featuring likeable characters with cute nicknames, dramatic events that change people’s lives, easily identified and fully consummated narrative arcs, transparently conversational prose and big, obvious metaphors. Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding cross-breeds two genres with limited gene pools, the baseball novel and the campus novel, and comes up with a vigorous hybrid, entertaining and engrossing, though almost absurdly high-minded.  It's easy to see why The Art of Fielding has done so well: it is charming, warm-hearted, addictive, and very hard to dislike.... The Art of Fielding feels like a novel from another, more innocent age. It revels in themes that have been unfashionable in literary fiction for generations – team spirit, male friendship, making the best of one's talents. In its optimism and lack of cynicism, in its celebration of the wide open spaces of the Midwest and its confidence in the deep inner meaning of baseball, it is a big American novel of the old school.... ...it creates a richly peopled world that you can fully inhabit in your mind, and to which you long to return when you put it down. Centering on an imaginary northern Wisconsin private school and its baseball star-in-the-making Henry Skrimshander, Harbach sidesteps much of the familiar mythmaking that can go along with spinning the American pastime into literature and instead delivers a rich, warmly human story that resonates even if you have no idea what a 6-4-3 double play looks like. Chad Harbach makes the case for baseball, thrillingly, in his slow, precious and altogether excellent first novel, “The Art of Fielding.”
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0316126691, Hardcover)Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Though The Art of Fielding is his fiction debut, Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist. He exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative, and in some 500 pages, there's rarely a word that feels out of place. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach's concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships--between friends, family, and lovers--and the unpredictable forces that complicate them. There's an unintended affair, a post-graduate plan derailed by rejection letters, a marriage dissolved by honesty, and at the center of the book, the single baseball error that sets all of these events into motion. The Art of Fielding is somehow both confident and intimate, simple yet deeply moving. Harbach has penned one of the year's finest works of fiction.--Kevin Nguyen (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:38:40 -0500) "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."--from publisher's description.… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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