On two novels that put the sport to very distinct symbolic work.
Sports in
general make very good metaphors—just ask George Carlin, whose bit on
baseball vs. football remains one of the great metaphorical analyses of all
time. But it seems to me that in American stories and narratives, no sport has
more consistently offered up metaphors for key themes and issues than baseball:
from fathers and sons in Field of Dreams (1989;
spoiler alert!) to relationships and love in Bull Durham (1988)
and For Love of the Game (1999),
good and evil in The
Natural (1952) to life and death in Bang the Drum Slowly
(1956), communal hope and disappointment in “Casey at the Bat”
(1888) to the Civil War in Play
for a Kingdom (1998), American culture and literature are full to overflowing
with baseball tales that depict yet transcend the sport. (I’ve even got my
personal favorite baseball and America story, for when I finally write that
screenplay.)
With the
exception of the putrid For Love of the
Game, each of the works in that paragraph (and plenty of others I didn’t
mention, such as 2011’s The
Art of Fielding) has a lot to recommend it. But to my mind there are
two baseball novels that stand out even among that crowded and impressive field,
vying for the title not only of greatest baseball work but of the ever-elusive Great
American Novel. Philip Roth’s The
Great American Novel (1973) does so self-consciously, overtly, swinging
for the fences from its title on; but if David James Duncan’s The
Brothers K (1992) is not quite so blatant in its ambition, both the
novel’s social and historical sweep (it covers with equal breadth the 50s, 60s,
70s, and 80s; Vietnam, leftist radicalism, Eastern philosophy, religion, work,
love, death) and its multi-layered echoes of Dostoyevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov (1880) make clear its own quest for the pennant. The
two novels differ greatly in tone—Roth’s is, like much of his work, sarcastic
and cynical; Duncan’s far more earnest and poignant—but also, and more
relevantly for this week’s series, in the uses to which they put their baseball
threads.
On the one hand,
Roth’s novel is far more centrally composed of such threads than Duncan’s—every
character in The Great American Novel
is connected in one way or another to the book’s fictional baseball team (the
Ruppert Mundys) and league (the Patriot League), whereas in Brothers K there are long sections in
which we follow characters into very distinct settings and worlds (Vietnam, India,
an isolated Canadian cabin) where baseball has little if any presence. Yet on
the other hand, and without spoiling the specifics too fully, Duncan uses baseball,
and its symbiotic relationship to the brothers’ father in particular, as a framing
element in deeper and more structural ways, so that wherever the boys go, and
whatever other themes their stories involve, we see the interconnections with
the sport and its defining familial and American presences. Which is to say, I
don’t know if Roth’s novel would fundamentally change if it focused on
basketball, or soccer, or the publishing world, or any other sphere; while
Duncan’s is to my mind, despite its breadth, a baseball novel through and
through.
Next diamond
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Baseball stories or works you’d highlight?
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