Last Thursday saw a major publishing event in Britain: the release of The Art of Fielding, the debut novel by American Chad Harbach. The book has been received with rapture in the States: the phrase ‘Great American Novel’ is being whispered and Harbach is routinely compared to Jonathan Franzen, the literati’s present infatuation. The comparison has migrated across the Atlantic. Mike Atherton, former England cricket captain and award winning sports columnist, wrote last week (£):
‘[Harbach] wears his learning more lightly than Franzen (although learned types will recognise all kinds of literary references) has a sharper feel for the rhythm of language on the page and is more content to let the narrative take its course. This is an outstanding novel about sport and, in Henry Skrimshander, Harbach has created a character who will keep sports psychologists in conversation for years.’
Henry Skrimshander is the novel’s protagonist, a very gifted baseball pitcher and fieldsman who succumbs to ‘the yips’: that state where mind suppresses instinct, and sporting talent implodes. Skrimshander’s decline is swift, brutal and total — think of John Van de Velde paddling in Carnoustie’s Barry Burn at the 1999 Open Golf Championship, Jonny Wilkinson’s collapse against Scotland at Murrayfield in 2008, or Ian Botham bagging an ignominious pair at Lords in 1981. Those dramas were psychological as well as sporting, and that appears to be the secret to Harbach’s success. On the other hand, Eric Weinberger, writing in the latest issue of the Spectator, takes a somewhat different view.
The Lawrence trial continues to make news. Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, has written a poem to mark last week’s judgment. It’s moving stuff, if you like that sort of thing. Here it is, courtesy of the Guardian:
‘Cold pavement indeed
the night you died,
murdered;
but the airborne drop of blood
from your wound
was a seed
your mother sewed
into hard ground –
your life’s length doubled,
unlived, stilled,
till one flower, thorned,
bloomed
in her hand,
love’s just blade.’
Meanwhile, the Costa Awards’ category winners have been and gone. There were one or two surprises: Julian Barnes The Sense of Ending was pipped at the post by Andrew Miller’s Pure in the fiction genre, and the judges unexpectedly chose Matthew Hollis’ biography of Edward Thomas over Claire Tomalin’s acclaimed life of Dickens. But there is no suppressing the admirers of ‘The Inimitable’ in his bicentennial year. Howard Jacobson took to the pages of Saturday’s Guardian to pan the BBC’s coverage of this unfolding event, particularly its lamentable adaptation of Great Expectations over the Christmas holiday. Jacobson quoted freely from the text, which is becoming something of a fashion. The Telegraph has asked Antonia Fraser, Edmund White and David Lodge to pick their favourite passages from Dickens. Now there’s a literary parlour game for 2012. Any takers?
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