This book is ostensibly about Henry Skrimshander, a baseball phenom, a shortstop from South Dakota. He's discovered in a summer league by Mike Schwartz, a sophomore football/baseball player at Westish College in Wisconsin. Schwartz convinces the school to offer Henry a scholarship and convinces Henry to come east, thus begins the novel. Clearly, baseball is the central metaphor, or the idea of play, and Henry, embodies this, the joy of play, an almost zen like concentration which allows him to compete, ballet like, in the field, "Expressionless, like God," attracting the attention of baseball scouts from all the major league teams. When he inadvertently throws a ball over the first basemen's head, hitting his roommate Owen in the face, he loses his aplomb, begins to doubt himself, begins to think rather than just act, and his game, his future, the team's future falls apart. Besides Henry, we are introduced to Henry's gay room mate and confidante, Owen Dunne, an aesthete who, nevertheless plays baseball, disregards all the rules, reads books in the dugout during the games, yet gains the affections of all his teammates. The other two players in the novel, besides the inimitable Schwartz is Guert Affenlight, Melville scholar, lover of the sea, and President of Westish College, and his troubled, prodigal daughter, Pella, just returned to Westish from a failed marriage.
These are the five protagonists who compete for our affections, fall in love, disappoint each other and ultimately help lead us, the reader, to tragedy and triumph. I somewhat figured out the ending, wondering how things would come together, but I was surprised by the emotions I felt at the end of the novel. It grabbed me, moved me, and made me think hard about mortality. Owen puts it best in his eulogy: "You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love. And you did that with more dedication than most, that work of building the soul---not for your own benefit but for the benefit of those who knew you. Which is partly why your death is so hard for us. It's hard to accept that a soul like yours, which took a lifetime to build, could cease to exist. It makes me angry, furious, at the universe, not to have you here. But of course your soul does exist, Guert, because you gave of it so unstintingly. It exists in your book, and in this school, and also in each of us. For that we'll always be grateful." The book is a good read, moves along, with pauses for reflection on perfection, on play, on love and the ways we live our lives, not always to our advantage, yet we persevere, we endure.
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