The Art of Fielding/Chad Harbach: Reflections

It took me many months to read The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach's much-discussed debut novel. It has moved from my bag to the floor to the couch to a shelf back onto the floor—but never into the pile of books I finally give up on.  It wasn't the quality of the book that kept me from the story; it was time.  I could never find enough of it to read all 512 pages.

This weekend, I did—walked away from my own work, sat down as snow showers were followed by rain then sun, and read.  I liked this story, liked the way that it was told.  I liked the actual paper the book was printed on—smooth paper for a smooth story.  True, this story about a college shortstop, a college president, a college catcher, a girl who arrives late to college, and a college star (you get the point) could be preposterous at turns, but it never lost its seamless sound.  That's because Chad Harbach writes careful and yet still light-filled sentences that honor not just story, but idea.

I dog-earred many pages.  I'm going to quote, below, from the paragraph that most moved me, that captured the mood of my present days, my internal monologue.  The passage comes late in the book, but I don't think it's a spoiler.  It is, instead, an elegant representation of how a talented novelist can be writing a story, complete unto itself, and at the same time be talking directly to the reader who holds the book in her hand.  Harbach in this passage is writing about a kid named Schwartz.  But he's doing more than that.  He's reaching farther.

A final word:  I went onto Amazon to see what other readers had thought after reading Fielding.  I should not have done that.  The unkind comments claiming this book to be pedestrian, for example, or cardboard, or cliche, left me shuddering and steeped inside this question:  How is ridicule acceptable, when healthy criticism will do?

A passage that moved me, from The Art of Fielding:

He hadn't pushed through that one last barrier, his fear of succeeding, beyond which the world lay totally open to him.  Schwartz would never live in a world so open.  His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and 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.

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Am I a Narcissist?

I'll be headed to London in a few days for a very quick trip and so, in typical Beth style, I am trying to complete every single task on every single list before I get on that plane.  Stupid, I know.

That means that the last few days have been consumed with the writing of the second draft of a commemorative book for a client, the back-and-forthing with an insurance agent, the prepping for a school visit at the Eighth Grade Center @ Springford, the watching of a documentary about graffiti, the blogging about Ismet Prcic's debut novel Shards, the writing of stories for a client news magazine, the neglect of a few emails I still have to write, the repolishing of my nails, the development of a plan to put my William novel into the world, the forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning, the thinking through of my spring Penn course, the preparation for the upcoming Jill Lepore lecture at Villanova University (wait, how does one prepare?), the reading of the first two chapters of The Art of Fielding because it is about time, the cooking of a dinner that could have been better, the reading of a friend's forthcoming novel, the writing of verse for our holiday card, the realization that the roof is leaking again, and the completion of an adult novel that has been in the works for years.  I also purchased a few early holiday gifts and made the decision—an emphatic one—that I do not like shopping.  No, I do not.

{For those, who, understandably, plan to read no further, please note (see below) that this tongue-in-cheekish list was produced to make a larger point.}

In the midst of all of this, I paged through (lightning speed) the December 5 issue of Newsweek.  (Frankly, I still have a lot of questions about this new iteration of Newsweek, but those questions are for another day.)  I stopped at page 61, the Omnivore page, where Diablo Cody and Charlize Theron look out upon the reader.  The story is called "The Narcissist Decade," and it's an essay Cody has penned in anticipation of the December 9 release of her film "Young Adult."

"Young Adult," as it turns out, is about a not-very-nice seeming young adult author.  Cody tells us:  "Mavis's humble peers possess something that eludes her more each year:  growth.  They've matured into seasoned adults with perspective and humility, while Mavis continues to flail in a self-created hell of reality TV, fashion magazines, blind dates, and booze."

(I sincerely hope that Mavis is not meant as a stand-in for all YA authors.  I sincerely hope that.  I do.)

In any case, later on in the essay, Cody, whose husband has told her that she shares a number of traits with Mavis (an assertion Cody at first denies), goes on to suggest that perhaps we are all narcissists.

Before you get as offended as I did, allow me to explain.  Sure, we're not all deranged homewreckers in pursuit of past glory.  But if the era of Facebook and Twitter has fed any monsters, it's those of vanity, self-obsession, and immaturity.  Who among us hasn't Googled an ex, or measured our own online social circle against that of a perceived rival, or snapped multiple "profile photos" in an attempt to find the best angle?  Who hasn't caught herself watching an episode of "Jersey Shore" and thought, "I'm a grown-up. Why am I concerned with these people and their sex lives?

I haven't actually ever done any of those things (helped in part by the fact that I never had an ex and that I'm too uncool to know what channel "Jersey Shore" is on).  But I suspect that anyone could look upon a blogger who enumerates her week's activities as a narcissist (for the record, I was just trying to make a point up there).  Any memoirist (and heck, I've written five and am halfway through a sixth) could also be called one of those—you know—those.  Any Facebooker who has ever logged a single status update could also get slammed with the term.

But here's what I'm going to suggest, a modest proposal:

It's how we live our whole life (lives?) that counts.

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