Punt's Not Dead

I won't claim to know much about baseball, but it does feature in a couple of my favourite books. Philip Roth delivered tremendous humour with 'The Great American Novel', the saga of an absurd team. Meanwhile, Don DeLillo used a legendary 1951 battle between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants to set up his monumental work, 'Underworld'. So I was decently inclined towards 'The Art Of Fielding' by Chad Harbach, a debut novel with a ten year incubation and a bunch of notable fans, including Jonathan Franzen. The book's reputation has been rising since its US release late last year. And sure enough, it's a fine read. As with DeLillo, there's a moment in the game that resonates beyond the outfield. The start of the book deals with sporting discipline and the challenges of academic life. The campus even hosts an imposing statue of Herman Melville, chronicler of the big quest. By the end, our supposed champions are confounded while the unlikely lads are doing well. Chad Harbach is an avowed fan of Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. That book gave us a forensic, uneasy picture of the college tennis regime. More information than you might ever need, but also a creeping discourse on the human condition. It's no crime that 'The Art Of Fielding' isn't on that level, but you would suppose that the follow-up will pitch it with even more panache.