Auther : Chad Harbach
Publisher : Little, Brown and Company
ISBN : 0316126691
ISBN13 : 9780316126694
Pages : 528
List Price : $25.99 $14.28
Book Rating :
Product Description
At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended.
Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.
As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment--to oneself and to others.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Though The Art of Fielding is his fiction debut, Chad Harbach writes with the self-assurance of a seasoned novelist. He exercises a masterful precision over the language and pacing of his narrative, and in some 500 pages, there's rarely a word that feels out of place. The title is a reference to baseball, but Harbach's concern with sports is more than just a cheap metaphor. The Art of Fielding explores relationships--between friends, family, and lovers--and the unpredictable forces that complicate them. There's an unintended affair, a post-graduate plan derailed by rejection letters, a marriage dissolved by honesty, and at the center of the book, the single baseball error that sets all of these events into motion. The Art of Fielding is somehow both confident and intimate, simple yet deeply moving. Harbach has penned one of the year's finest works of fiction.--Kevin Nguyen
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The Art of Fielding: A Novel Reviews
| 244 of 279 people found the following review helpful:  Astonishingly Awful, This review is from: The Art of Fielding: A Novel (Hardcover) I have never felt compelled to write an online review before. But as someone who reads four or five novels a month (mostly popular fiction) and works in the publishing industry, I find the praise for this book so inexplicable and disturbing that I feel the need to speak out. Cardboard, cliched characters (the coach? Henry's father? the chef? other nominees?) engaged in laughable dialogue (as you read the book, ask yourself whether you know any college students -- any -- who talk this way) in a plot held together by cheap TV-esque cleverness (a gay baseball player who after striking out says the pitcher is cute . . . a scene in which readers are led to believe the main character is overhearing two people engaged in sex behind a door -- but only because the writer holds off telling us for a few paragraphs that the character is at the gym outside the weight room). People and themes disappear without a trace (the architect husband? Gone. Aparicio Rodriguez? Disappeared. The... Read more 145 of 171 people found the following review helpful:  Strong writer seeks his editorial equal, By This review is from: The Art of Fielding: A Novel (Hardcover) Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program ( What's this?) I really liked the first 300 pages of Chad Harbach's debut novel, The Art of Fielding. As I was reading that 3/5 of the book, I probably would have told you that I loved it. But a funny thing happened between that point and turning the final page. The novel drifted, and tried to do things it hadn't before, and ultimately even diluted its own strengths a bit. Harbach's players are all deserving of praise. They're authentic, human, unique yet relatable - his biggest misstep in their creation is probably their names (another instance where a strong editor maybe could have said, you know, this is distracting). The plot & themes are fairly standard liberal arts college/transitioning to adulthood stuff. The authorial voice is entertaining enough and the various avenues the characters use to avoid or delay their maturation are grounds for meaningful insight, enough that the somewhat cliche' elements are just the field on which Harbach's particular game is played... Read more 40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:  I Call Foul on This Overhyped Book, This review is from: The Art of Fielding: A Novel (Hardcover) Right off the bat, I should have been wary. Maybe it was the Vanity Fair article that practically capsized under the weight of its own praise. Maybe it was the plethora of celebrity writer endorsements. Whatever it was, I waved it away and raced to get a copy of this book. That I raced to my library's website and not the local bookstore is at least some consolation. When the book arrived, I thrilled to the chunky weight of it in my hands. The crisp navy and white cover was a plus as was the thick, loopy typeface of the title. Somewhere in the middle, I cracked it open and buried my nose in the rich scent of its cream colored pages, a scent not unlike china clay with an undernote of Play-Doh. I shivered. And then I started reading. The first twenty pages were good. The next twenty were okay. By page forty, I was skimming. I gave up at page fifty, exhausted by the affected prose, excessive alliteration and quippy... Read more |
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