On pessimism,
optimism, realism, and baseball.
David Bradley’s
debut novel South Street (1975) is
many things, often at the same time: a tragicomic farce of urban life; a
romance; a crime novel; a biting satire; a raucous celebration. It opens with
one of the most well-executed set-pieces you’ll ever read, features numerous
unique and memorable characters, portrays its slice of Philadelphia with
hyperbole and yet (to my mind) authenticity, and made me laugh out loud on more
than a few occasions while keeping me in genuine suspense about the resolution
of its central plotlines. Which is to say, there are lots of very good reasons
to read this under-rated American novel, and lots of concurrent ways to
AmericanStudy it. But among them is the unique and telling use to which it puts
the Philadelphia Phillies games that serve as a near-constant backdrop in the
South Street bar that’s the novel’s central setting.
On one level, the
baseball games are literally and figuratively another of the novel’s jokes—the Phillies
are always losing, and every new arrival to the bar simply inquires by how much
they happen to be losing on this particular night. On the one night when they’re
actually, miraculously ahead, the heavens refuse to cooperate, the game gets
rained out, and the prospective victory is lost. Yet if these perennial losers
would seem to validate the characters’ (and novel’s) most cynical and
pessimistic views of their world and future, there’s a complication: the bar
owner, Leo, keeps turning the games on, optimistically insistent that this time
might be different. That dance, between pessimism and optimism, no joy in
Mudville and Mighty Casey’s eternal possibilities, “dem bums” and “there’s always
next year!,” is at the heart of much sports fandom, it seems to me—and much
of American history, culture, and identity besides.
So does Bradley’s
novel simply vacillate between the poles, just as it does between comedy and tragedy,
humor and pathos, farce and slice of life? Not exactly, although it does make
all those moves and more. I would also argue that in his portrayal of those
hapless yet somehow still hopeful Phillies, Bradley has created a powerfully
realistic image—not just of sports fandom, or of human nature, but of the
African American community and its conflicted, contradictory, but sustained and
crucial relationship to the nation. Ta-Nehisi
Coates has written frequently and eloquently about the defining presence
of racism and white supremacy in the American story, and how much such
forces have made America a losing game for its African American citizens. Yet,
undeniably and inspiringly, the vast majority of African Americans have long
refused—and continue to refuse—to give in to the pessimism, have found ways to
maintain an optimism about America and the future that is mirrored in Leo’s
nightly return to the Phillies. There’s always next year, indeed.
Last baseball
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other baseball stories you’d highlight?
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