The Art of Fielding

“He wished that college required you to use your body more.”

Henry feels uncomfortable at Westish, where he considers himself too small-town to fit in with the intellectuals. He worries that his conservative background will set him apart and tries to minimize discussion of Lankton, his hometown. Henry finds his classmates’ conversations daunting and feels most comfortable on the baseball field.

“Coach Cox could afford to treat him as an equal. Much the same way, perhaps, that a priest appreciates his lone agnostic parishioner, the one who doesn’t want to be saved but keeps showing up for the stained glass and the singing.”

Coach Cox and Owen have an unusual relationship: Because Owen doesn’t try to assert his authority as a player, Cox views him as an objective contributor. The metaphorical comparison of Owen to a “lone agnostic parishioner” reveals that he doesn’t worship at the altar of baseball to the extent that his teammates do.

“Putting Henry at shortstop—it was like taking a painting that had been shoved in a closet and hanging it in the ideal spot. You instantly forgot what the room had looked like before.”

The simile of “like […] hanging [a painting] in the ideal spot” shows that Henry’s power on the field is inspiring and desirable. The novel repeatedly elevates his abilities by describing them in aesthetic terms that equate his talent with artistic merit.

“[T]he single magical sentence made him want to roam the world and write books about what he found.”

The discovery of Herman Melville’s journal changed the course of Guert’s life, inspiring him to convert from a biology major to a future professor of literature. Like his hero, Guert aspired to experience adventure, and discovering the journal containing Melville’s unpublished speech helped him understand the transformative power of literature.

“After those four years, he returned to the Midwest. He’d turned twenty-five, the Age of Unfolding, and it was time to write a novel, the way his hero had. He moved to a cheap apartment in Chicago and set to work, but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but […] to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly […] with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him.”

The discovery of Melville’s journal lit a fire in Guert, and he resolved to reach the same level of literary genius. Realizing that he wasn’t capable of demonstrating this same talent was a tremendous disappointment. Just as Schwartz realized that he wasn’t meant to be a baseball star but instead a coach, Guert realized that he wasn’t meant to be the writer but rather the teacher/critic who praises and analyzes the work of other writers.

“A few fathers—the ones too tough for decaf, the ones who shot deer—stood in a row.”

Guert’s affair with Owen leaves him preoccupied about how others perceive his masculinity. As he heads to the baseball field, he notes the types of fathers he observes. The fathers whom he views as the epitome of masculinity create their own space in the outfield, and he understands that he wouldn’t be welcome in this space.

“He possessed the three qualities I associated most closely with my father—learned, virtuous, flummoxed by me—and he displayed them all much more conspicuously.”

Like her father, Pella is deeply analytical. As she considers the events of the past few years, she considers what attracted her to David. Pella revels in the notion of the “Elektra complex” and her nickname of “Pellektra” that she earned at school, poking fun at herself. However, she acknowledges that David provided the same kind of attention that she missed receiving from her father. This understanding helps free her.

“It was confusing to have leaped precociously ahead of her high-achieving, economically privileged peers by doing precisely what her low-achieving, economically unprivileged peers tended to do: getting married, staying home, keeping house. She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.”

Pella had a privileged upbringing but abandoned her entry to Yale in order to elope with an older man. The promise of opportunity initially attracted her, but he restricted her in ways that she didn’t anticipate. In getting married, Pella hoped to demonstrate her maturity, but the marriage only slowed her development.

“AVERT DISASTER, in fact, would have been a perfect school motto—the purpose of the place, as far as Schwartz could tell, was to keep three thousand would-be maniacs sedated by boredom until a succession of birthdays transformed them into adults.”

Schwartz came of age in a rough section of Chicago. His high school was dedicated more to surveillance and policing than to education. Consequently, he easily slipped through the cracks after his mother’s death left him orphaned. Schwartz grew accustomed to taking advantage of the system to maximize his freedom.

“She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights.”

As Schwartz recounts Guert’s often-told tale of Ellen Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Pella is sure to insert Ellen’s name so that she isn’t just remembered as “Mrs. Emerson” or “his wife.” Pella tries to fight this passivity in herself by using rebellion as a means to prevent her father or husband from objectifying her. Emerson’s unearthing of Ellen foreshadows the burial of Pella’s father.

“That was what made the story so epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.”

Schwartz has accepted that he’ll never be the greatest athlete and that his strengths lie in encouraging greatness in others. Most people can’t put themselves through the masochistic paces necessary to reach their full potential, but Schwartz knows that he can unlock this ability in those he coaches.

“It occurred to Affenlight that if someone aimed a gun at his chest right now, Whitman would take the bullet.”

Guert heads to the hospital to visit Owen with a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry in his pocket. He’s surprised to see Genevieve, Owen’s mother, and realizes how close he is to being found out. She and others could view him bringing this particular book with him to visit Owen as incriminating.

“The problem, like most problems in life, probably had to do with his footwork.”

Henry approaches everything the same way he approaches baseball, methodically considering, from a shortstop’s perspective, how to solve a problem. While baseball has, in many ways, prepared him to deal with problems, he becomes untethered when footwork isn’t the solution.

“His tone indicated that it was an open question as to which of these was the loftier title.”

Chef Spirodocus holds his kitchen in high regard. Pella’s last-minute request annoys him, and he shows her that he doesn’t appreciate her using the “daughter of the president” card. Spirodocus doesn’t care for bureaucracy and wishes that more people would value his cooking as he does.

“Although he and Owen were not much alike and in a way kissing Owen was much like kissing a woman […] Except with women Affenlight leaned forward, and now he leaned back.”

Guert’s new relationship with Owen is a major step in his journey of sexual self-discovery. Despite their considerable age difference, Owen is the more experienced in their encounters. Guert finds it confusing to use his encounters with women as a point of comparison; nevertheless, his heterosexual courtships provide a frame of reference to help him feel more prepared.

“For Schwartz this formed the paradox at the heart of baseball, or football, or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”

Schwartz approaches baseball philosophically. He realizes that he always assumed that meritocracy governs sports and that performance can be based on the desire for self-improvement, but now that his physical ability to self-improve has plateaued, he fears that he’ll lose access to something essential that he loves about this sport.

“Baseball, in its quiet way, was an extravagantly harrowing game. Football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse—these were melee sports. You could make yourself useful by hustling and scrapping more than the other guy. You could redeem yourself through sheer desire. But baseball was different. Schwartz thought of it as Homeric—not a scrum but a series of isolated contests. Batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball. You couldn’t storm around, snorting and slapping people, the way Schwartz did while playing football. You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you fucked up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?”

Schwartz considers the uniquely cruelty of baseball: The very nature of play makes individual errors more visible. From his usual philosophical stance, Schwartz considers how baseball requires more inner strength than other sports do.

“Getting saved by men, finding a new mother—her fantasies were becoming more regressive the second, a known hazard of being around David, who induced a strange powerlessness in her.”

Pella is self-conscious about the process of reinvention, noting with irony how she fled to her father while trying to proclaim her independence. Determined to leave behind the nickname “Pellektra,” Pella tries to separate herself from the dependent state that David fostered. She recognizes the irony that she finds solace in washing dishes.

“He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable, or wouldn’t be repeated, but because one more of life’s mysteries had been revealed.”

After Guert and Owen consummate their relationship, Guert feels sad. His relationship with Owen constituted significant self-discovery, and he enjoyed the anticipation of each new phase. The allusion to life’s mysteries and the sadness that can accompany their revelation expands Guert’s reflections on his sexual experience with Owen to make them more universal.

“Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.”

As Guert discusses “Steve Blass disease” with Aparicio, he realizes that he’s critically examining the factors that contributed to each player’s failure rather than empathizing with them as human beings. Guert acknowledges that years of academia have conditioned him to view things analytically rather than through a human lens.

“Schwartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his 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. […] 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. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you’ve barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier’s soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.”

A masochistic need to succeed drives Schwartz, and he has accepted that while he has control over his work ethic, he can’t control his sheer talent. Schwartz is meant to be a coach, not a star player, and though he’s a skilled mentor, he struggles to reconcile his dreams for himself with this different identity.

“What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the non-baseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words.”

Relationships have continually overwhelmed Henry. He’s most comfortable on the baseball field, where his actions speak for themselves. He’s least comfortable in situations that require him to advocate for himself. However, his reflections reveal his growth and his openness to continue growing.

“She’s been reading too much, he thought—had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do.”

As Pella suggests that they dig up her father’s grave and move his body, Schwartz wonders if this far-fetched idea is the result of being overly imaginative while grieving. The suggestions of literature have helped shape both Schwartz and Pella, and he interprets her suggestion as a natural component of their relationship and of her relationship with her father.