Henry is introduced as a gifted yet socially awkward shortstop and disciple of a handbook for middle infielders that gives the book its name, and his pursuit of perfection leaves him as something of a cipher in the early going. The issue for Henry, and the characters around him, is how recovery from these errors on and off the field gives shape to people’s lives. That’s because instead of focusing on runs and hits, Harbach is most concerned with errors, that cruel statistic line unique to baseball that no one, not even an athlete touched by natural greatness, can ever eliminate.

With that in mind, it was hard to imagine Chad Harbach’s debut novel about a scrappy college baseball team offering much new to say about the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd or anything resembling Updike’s “lyric little bandbox” in 2011.Īnd yet, that’s what Harbach has done with “The Art of Fielding.” 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. Touched on by a library’s worth of authors including John Updike, Stephen King and Don DeLillo, there’s something about the game’s deliberate pace, individual focus and enduring simplicity that seems irresistible to novelists. Urn:oclc:816486722 Republisher_date 20140619014147 Republisher_operator Scandate 20140618065000 Scanner terms of conjuring a shorthand for a certain American innocence, there are few delivery systems quite so direct as baseball. Urn:lcp:artoffieldingnov00harb:epub:8dcdcdcf-3c8e-4028-bf1b-a15e289ce1e3 Extramarc MIT Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier artoffieldingnov00harb Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5m92ww01 Invoice 11 Isbn 9780316126694Ġ316126691 Lccn 2011014912 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 9.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.6 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Openlibrary OL24842482M Openlibrary_edition

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 15:08:57 Bookplateleaf 0010 Boxid IA1119919 Boxid_2 CH113201 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York DonorĬityofsausalitolibrary Edition 1st ed.

The art of fielding by chad harbach