Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction Matt Brennan (bio) John A. Lauricella. Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 1999. 241 pp. Cloth, $28.50. Home Games: Essays on Baseball Fiction—mdashlike many great labors of love—was conceived accidentally. Sitting in a seminar at Cornell University, John Lauricella listened while the professor discussed Faulkner's third chapter in The Sound and the Fury. When the professor quoted Jason Compson's statement that he'd never "bet on any team that fellow Ruth played on," a classmate asked ingenuously, "Who is Ruth?"—and suddenly Lauricella's book began its gestation. His premise is that to discover the metaphoric sense of baseball fiction what makes it more than mere recreational diversion—readers must attend to its literary and cultural contexts. Moreover, he argues persuasively for building a canon of baseball novels that can stand beside other serious non-baseball fiction in American literature. The quest to establish a canon of baseball novels leads Lauricella to organize part . of his study into chapters analyzing four important novels Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al (1916); Bernard Malamud's The Natural (1952); Mark Harris's The Southpaw (1953), the first of the Henry Wiggen tetralogy; and Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association (1968). Though Lauricella, in passing, grants similar literary status to a few other novels—Heywood Broun's The Sun Field (1923), Philip Roth's The Great American Novel (1973), Lamar Herrin's The Rio Loja Ringmaster (1977)—he purposely limits his scope. Lauricella refreshingly emphasizes the aesthetic elements of fiction that create meaning rather than considering the novels as expressions of politics, ideology, or gender. Consequently, he avoids the many baseball novels of negligible merit, those that commit the "cardinal errors" of lacking serious intent and of failing to regard the characters as "real." Accordingly, Lauricella distinguishes his examples from boys' books, Zane Grey's pulp fiction, and even W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, which he calls "a sentimental fantasy, phony and self-indulgent." Instead, Lauricella focuses on novels he believes compare with works by Hemingway, Hawthorne, and Twain. Only when critics discriminate according to quality, Lauricella asserts, will accomplished baseball novels like The Natural be treated as seriously as non-baseball novels. The chapters on the novels by Lardner, Malamud, Harris, and Coover are the most accessible and should prove engaging even to readers not yet familiar with the novels. Indeed, so well-written are these detailed treatments, I bet they will prompt most readers to track down the novels to (re)experience them firsthand. Generally, Lauricella organizes these chapters by the order of events in the novels' plots, but the idea of exile and homecoming runs loosely through all four discussions and helps to unify them. Notably, Lauricella observes [End Page 107] that a resistance to pat closure a sentimental happy ending characterizes these first-rate fictions, all of which "describe homecomings that are either failed, incomplete, or complicated by dissatisfaction or anxiety" (p. 219). This complication helps make the novels original, unlike, for example, the film ending to The Natural, which distorts Malamud's myth of failure into a clichéd fairy tale resembling most baseball stories. If Lauricella's attempt to elevate select baseball novels to canonical status is helped by his intelligent individual analyses, discussing the likes of The Southpaw alongside such masterpieces as The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury also implicitly raises the ante for the four novels, especially since Lauricella deliberately eschews works like Shoeless Joe that receive frequent critical attention. In fact, part 1 functions to establish the significance of baseball in the work of undeniably canonical writers and thus to prepare us to bring equally high expectations to so-called baseball novels he discusses later. This first part examines allusions to baseball in not only Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway but also in the somewhat lesser-recognized authors Thomas Wolfe and James T. Farrell. Here Lauricella both uncovers the allusions' literary and cultural contexts and connects them to the works' dominant themes. For example, in his excellent chapter on The Great Gatsby and the Black Sox scandal, Lauricella describes Jay Gatsby's "gonnegtion...

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