Brittle Innings

Having recently read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I decided to make this my first Michael Bishop book and... what a cool mashup it turned out to be!

Brittle Innings comes across as though Mary Shelley and Ray Bradbury got together to write Frankenstein meets Huck Finn on a baseball farm team. Macabre, twisted, and brutal at times, in the hands of a lesser author, this could easily have been a complete mess but Bishop works a wonder with this tale. He is one heck of a writer. His ability to 'voice' the different characters is uncanny and the dialogue is perfectly pitched for the time-period of the story.

Four solid stars.

I first read BRITTLE INNINGS about fifteen years ago. It's a book that hangs around in your head for a long time though, lemme tell ya. Which is another way of saying it's damn good writing. Well, I just finished reading it again. It's late October 2012 and the third game of the World Series is on TV tonight and the Tigers ared down two games to zip to the Giants. But now they're in Detroit, so hope springs eternal.

Yes, this is a baseball novel, but it's much much more than just that. I got an inscribed Fairwood Press (reprint) first edition direct from the author this time and he calls it a "genre of my own invention ... a Southern Gothic World War Two baseball novel." Well, with a 'return of Frankenstein' subplot, it's certainly all show more that. It's also a coming-of-age novel for its narrator, jug-eared preternaturally talented young Danny Boles. And a love story on more than one level too. There's plenty in here about southern life, racism and the whole WWII era too. And there's a pennant race - for the Class C Chattahoochee Valley League which straddles Georgia and Alabama.

The players and their southern-baseball vernacular are pitch perfect and so are the racial attitudes. There are heroes and villains, but the heart of the novel is the unlikely friendship struck up between Danny and his hulking 'monster' roommate, 'Jumbo' Hank Clerval. If you are a devotee of classic Gothic horror books, then that last name should ring a bell. Even if you're not and it doesn't, you'll catch on soon enough.

BRITTLE INNINGS is a novel worth revisiting, especially during World Series week. Author Michael Bishop (a prolific writer of sci-fi and fantasy) obviously knows his baseball and he has spun a tale that will keep you turning pages well past your bedtime.

While Bishop's book is its own unique kinda animal, I was reminded of other great baseball books I have read over the years. They are, in no particular order: The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings by William Brashler; Mark Harris's Bang the Drum Slowly (from his classic Southpaw tetralogy), and John R. Tunis's The Kid from Tompkinsville and The Kid Comes Back . There are plenty of great baseball books out there of course, but none quite like BRITTLE INNINGS. If the Tigers win the whole show this year, I may have to read it again just for the pure joy of it. show less

For all that I'm not overly fond of actually watching baseball, I like reading fictional stories about it an awful lot. I've read (and liked) Field of Dreams, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Screwball, The Last Days of Summer, and many more. The mythology of baseball seems to lend itself to stories that aren't exactly grounded in our reality.

But the king of that sort of basball book has got to be Brittle Innings. One the one hand, it's a gritty, detailed portrait of life in the southern baseball leagues. You get to see it all, from practices to road trips to actual games, in understated prose that captures the feel of an era.

On the other hand, there's that myth thing, and in this case, it's a whopper, centered in the character of Henry show more "Jumbo" Clerval. I won't spoil the revelation, but the amazing thing is that Bishop manages to make Clerval as grounded and real as all of his teammates. show less

Intruiging read. Told as recollection of a 17 year old's first time away from home. He is travelling to Georgia in 1943 war torn southern America. His new job is as a professional baseball player in the Chatahoochee Valley League, a Class C team in the Philadelphia Phillies organization. He encounters, predjudice, racism, love, sex, and a friendship that he (and I) never would have expected. We learn about small town life during this era thru baseball and other life lessons. I'd like to write more and be more descriptive, but reading it yourself and finding all the pleasures in the story is too pleasurable for me to ruin. It succeeds as a biography, a sports novel, AND a sci-fi story. All elements were woven deftly into the story and show more were believable. I would DEFINITELY RECCOMEND this to you all! show less

Great read, very atmospheric. You don't see many gothic baseball stories, and speculative fiction is poorer for it.

The perfect combination of Gothic novel, Baseball novel and Story of the American South.

-a sublime coming-of-age story set in the USA during WWII that carefully blends , the "Frankenstein" mythos, baseball, and a bit of that old "Dandelion Wine" magic for a truly memorable read...