[For this year’s Super Bowl week series, I wanted to write about some of our great works of sports literature. Leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU English Studies alum & budding sports journalist!]
How three very
different but equally talented American authors can reveal the stages of a
youthful AmericanStudier’s perspectives on sports, America, and life.
When I was a
kid, my growing interest in the stories and dramas of sports, and especially
baseball, found literary expression in the novels of Matt Christopher. Christopher’s
novels focus on very believable and universal conflicts as faced, and
eventually overcome, by their youthful protagonists; as illustrated by my
favorite baseball book of his, Catcher
with a Glass Arm (1985), such conflicts include the psychological
effects of being beaned and peer teasing over an athletic weakness. While there
may have been occasional details that revealed the particular setting or time
period of the books, I don’t remember any, and my instinct is not: Christopher’s
explicit goal was to create books that spanned places and times, to which
any reader could connect with equal interest and meaning.
As I started to develop
into a teenage AmericanStudier (kind of like a teenage werewolf, but more
consistent and less scary), I started to want sports and baseball novels that
engaged more overtly with those historical and social questions, that felt as
if they were a part of our national narratives and stories. A book like Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel
(1973) was funny and over-the-top and compelling, but the baseball was a bit
too metaphorical for it to qualify as a sports novel; Ring
Lardner’s You Know Me, Al (1916) was
extremely realistic and biting but a bit too cynical for my young taste. For
me, as
apparently for many teenage AmericanStudiers, the pinnacle of these
contextualized, real world baseball novels were the works of John
Tunis, and specifically his classic The
Kid From Tomkinsville (1940). Tunis’s novel exists in, and more exactly
captures, its Depression-era America quite fully without losing a bit of its
narrative excitement; indeed, by the end the Kid’s baseball story and the story
of a damaged but resilient America seem very much to have merged.
I haven’t
outgrown my love for Tunis—writing this post makes me want to reread Kid right now, actually—but I have to
admit that I have in the years since discovered an author and novel that even
more impressively exemplify what an American baseball story can be and do. David
James Duncan’s The Brothers K (1992)
might seem to be about much more than baseball—it’s a rewriting of The Brothers Karamazov that’s also a
multigenerational family saga of the 1950s and 60s, Vietnam, the counter-culture,
religion, writing, Eastern spirituality, sibling rivalries and bonds, humor, love,
and more—yet at the same time it’s entirely
about baseball, not as metaphor so much as metonym, as a
representation of the worst and best of American dreams and identities and
histories and possibilities. It might be both the great American novel (it’s
definitely one of the greatest under-read ones) and the greatest baseball
novel, and for this AmericanStudier that combination is most definitely, yes, a
grand slam.
Next
SportsLitStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports literature or writing you’d highlight?
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