Harvey Freedenberg

You don’t have to like baseball to savor Chad Harbach’s sumptuous debut novel, a wise and tender story of love and friendship, ambition and the cruelty of dashed dreams, featuring an appealing cast of characters.

From the day he discovers Henry Skrimshander on a sun-bleached American Legion baseball field, Mike Schwartz is on a mission to turn the gifted shortstop into a major-league-caliber player. Mike, the team captain who’s writing his senior thesis on the Stoics and quotes Schiller in his pregame speeches, persuades Henry to enroll at tiny Westish College, a school with a charming, if eccentric, attachment to Herman Melville that stems from the unearthing of a long-forgotten lecture the novelist gave there in 1880.

Thanks to Mike’s obsessive coaching, Henry is on the fast track to a hefty signing bonus, until the day a routine throw to first base sails wide, nearly killing his roommate, outfielder Owen “Buddha” Dunne, probably the only player in baseball history to read Kierkegaard in the dugout. But Owen is much more than a victim of Henry’s errant arm. He’s the lover of Guert Affenlight, Melville scholar and Westish College president, whose 23-year-old daughter Pella appears on campus, fleeing her brief marriage, and eventually falls into a relationship with Mike Schwartz. The ensuing intricate emotional dances only add to the growing tension as the Westish Harpooners improbably claw their way to the Division III national championship game.

Harbach demonstrates an impressive gift for balancing his exploration of these fragile entanglements with an absorbing, well-plotted story, so we’re rooting as hard for the small company of troubled souls as we are for the ragtag Westish nine.

There aren’t many books of 500 pages that feel too short. But like a true fan enjoying a game of baseball as it scrolls its leisurely signature across a summer afternoon, there are moments when you will find yourself wishing The Art of Fielding would never end. It’s that good.

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BookPage editor Eliza Borné chats with Chad Harbach minutes before his appearance at the Southern Festival of Books:

To the ranks of memorable literary heroines add the name of Margo Crane, the protagonist of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s passionate new novel, Once Upon a River. Navigating the borderline between civilization and the harsh, dangerous natural world, it’s a story of a journey that begins with the search for a missing parent and ends in self-discovery.

After her father is killed in an incident provoked by her own impulsive act, 16-year-old Margo sets out in a flat-bottomed teak rowboat on the Stark River in southwestern Michigan to find her mother, who has abandoned the family. Margo’s hero is Annie Oakley, her bible a biography of the legendary sharpshooter. With Oakley, Margo shares an uncanny ability to wield a .22 Marlin rifle, displaying feats of marksmanship that provide some of the novel’s most dramatic moments. Though it’s set in the late 1970s, that linkage contributes to the novel’s timeless feel.

Along the way, Margo encounters a succession of men whose conduct runs the gamut from depravity to tenderness. To one of these men she’s the “wolf girl,” to another she’s a “river spirit,” but whatever form her complex, shape-shifting character takes, Margo manages to sustain herself in every sort of adversity through a combination of courage, stubbornness and ability to thrive in the natural world. Her most improbable relationship is with an elderly, dying man named Smoke, whose solicitude, born of an understanding of the real nature of Margo’s quest, provides the foundation on which she can hope to build something approaching a normal life.

This is not a novel for the squeamish. There’s incest, rape, murder and graphic descriptions of animal skinning, from deer to muskrat, while Margo’s self-absorption and frequent misjudgments hardly qualify her for sainthood. Campbell, who lives in Kalamazoo, excels at evoking her home territory with a keenness of observation and naturalism that call to mind the best of Jim Harrison’s Michigan-based fiction. Combine these qualities with a plot that’s a thrilling variation on the classic journey narrative, and one has a novel that stakes a serious claim to an enduring place in our literary world.

Joining a distinguished list of predecessors who’ve re-imagined Shakespeare’s work, in his third novel, Chris Adrian, one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” offers a contemporary version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, set in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. It’s a lively, bawdy and at times perplexing tale that pulsates between fantasy and reality to explore the themes of loss and grief.

On a mid-June night, the faerie queen Titania, deep in mourning for a son she had seized from the human world who’s now dead of leukemia, and abandoned by her husband Oberon, impulsively frees the trickster Puck. In the fog-shrouded park where he and his companions work their mischief, they come upon three troubled humans searching for a party none is eager to attend: Henry, a pediatrician whose lover, Bobby, has left him; Will, an arborist, similarly haunted by his girlfriend Carolina’s decision to end their relationship; and Molly, a former divinity student whose boyfriend has committed suicide. All of these characters are connected in unexpected and meaningful ways. Contributing to the chaos and complication is the presence of a group of homeless people rehearsing a production of Soylent Green, intending to dramatize their belief that the mayor of San Francisco is attempting to reduce their population by turning them into food. It’s a complex stew, ensuring a night that “would end in joy or ruin.”

Over the course of the evening the human and faerie worlds collide in a series of tragicomic encounters. Into that account, Adrian patiently stitches the moving backstories of his human protagonists, exploring the tragedies that have upended their lives, forcing them to confront their own losses and the universality of human suffering.

The novel’s episodic, at times frustratingly obscure plot is balanced by the strength of Adrian’s imagination, rendering the world of the faeries and the realm they cohabit with the humans for this single night in wild, often fantastic detail. Think of The Great Night as a triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch: riotous, occasionally inscrutable and yet consistently stimulating.

Red Hook Road, the latest novel from Ayelet Waldman (Love and Other Impossible Pursuits), begins with an almost unimaginable tragedy—the death of a young couple in a fiery automobile accident barely an hour after their wedding ceremony—and, in its aftermath over the course of four summers in a small town in coastal Maine, weaves a tale of equally profound redemption and grace.

After Becca Copaken and John Tetherly perish on Red Hook Road, the tensions between their families, centering on the relations between the two matriarchs, quickly bubble to the surface. Iris Copaken is a professor of comparative literature, the daughter of Emil Kimmelbrod, an eminent violinist who escaped the fate of his family in the Holocaust. Though she’s descended from solid Maine stock on her mother’s side and has summered there her entire life, Iris is still considered one of those “from away” in the eyes of Jane Tetherly, who runs a cleaning service and whose family’s humble past and troubled present contrast with the Copakens’ more genteel existence.

The devastating double loss ripples outward through a diverse and generally sympathetic cast of characters, and Waldman displays a sure hand in portraying the subtly different effect those deaths have on each one. Becca’s sister and John’s brother, Ruthie and Matt, increasingly attracted to each other, struggle to decide whether to abandon promising academic careers to realize their older siblings’ dream of reconditioning a classic wooden yacht to start a Caribbean charter service. Mr. Kimmelbrod becomes a mentor to Samantha, a Cambodian girl adopted by Jane’s sister and a violin prodigy. Iris and her husband Daniel must confront the fault lines in their long marriage. No one touched by such terrible loss can emerge from the experience unscathed, and the faltering steps taken by Waldman’s characters feel organic, not shoehorned into any prepackaged notion of grief’s unfolding and resolution.

Enhancing the drama at the story’s core, and delivered with unfussy erudition, are insights into the craft of yacht building, the music of Bach and the unchanging rhythms of summer life along the Maine coast. These elements coalesce to create a palpably realistic world.

The danger facing any novelist wrestling with the subject of unfathomable grief lies in allowing honest emotions to spill over into excessive sentimentality. In telling a story charged throughout with intense emotion, Waldman navigates that boundary with confidence and empathy. 

With long-established newspapers passing from the scene and many others on life support, it’s the perfect time for a satiric look at the business. International journalist Tom Rachman supplies that and much more in The Imperfectionists, his sly novel-in-stories about the travails of the staff struggling to keep a small English-language paper afloat in Rome while wrestling with their messy personal lives.

Each of Rachman’s stories focuses on a different staffer, and from one to the next he deftly hits all the notes on the emotional scale. Comic highlights include “Bush Slumps to New Low in Polls,” in which Lloyd Burko, the aging and desperate Paris correspondent, fabricates a story about a shift in France’s policy in Gaza to save his job, and “The Sex Lives of Islamic Extremists,” starring Winston Cheung, a feckless one-time primatologist fighting a losing battle for the position of Cairo stringer.

Balancing these wry tales are stories like “World’s Oldest Liar Dies at 126,” sketching the painful transformation of obituary writer Arthur Gopal after the death of his eight-year-old daughter. In “U.S. General Optimistic on War,” editor-in-chief Kathleen Solson confronts the consequences of her husband’s infidelity, and in “Markets Crash Over Fears of China Slowdown,” hard-charging CFO Abbey Pinnola is forced to share an awkward transatlantic flight with a copydesk editor whose job she eliminated.

Interspersed with the novel’s 11 stories are flashbacks that trace the history of the paper from its creation by a wealthy Atlanta family through its brief flourishing and slow unraveling. When the founder’s grandson arrives in 2004, he’s more devoted to walking his basset hound, Schopenhauer, than he is to visiting the newsroom, where the staff drives corrections editor Herman Cohen to fits of sputtering rage by resorting to the acronym “GWOT” for “Global War on Terror” (entry No. 18,238 in the style guide he dubs, with ill-founded optimism, “The Bible”).

Perhaps the unnamed paper is deserving of the destiny that looms over it in these stories. But by the time its fate has become clear, it’s hard not to greet it with a touch of sympathy engendered by Rachman’s vivid tales.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

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Interview with Tom Rachman for The Imperfectionists.

When 26-year-old Denny Cullen’s mother dies suddenly, he returns from Wales to his Dublin home to help bury her and mourn her loss. That trip launches first-time novelist Trevor Byrne’s energetic and winning tale.

To say that Denny is down on his luck is an understatement. He’s living in the family home with his lesbian sister and her lover, but his brother, who owns the house, is about to evict them. Unemployed and forced to live on the dole, he’s barely able to scrape together 200 euros to buy a car from another brother who’s been using it as a chicken coop. Denny hangs out with mates like Maggit, who steals a PlayStation for his son’s sixth birthday present, and Pajo, who’s abandoned Catholicism to explore Buddhist practice and conducts a hilarious séance that’s interrupted by the voice of Simon Cowell blaring from the television in another room.

Despite their scruffy existence, there’s a sense in which Denny and his friends feel like searchers, not slackers. Most are teetering on a precipice of self-destruction, and despite their more than occasional stumbles, Byrne makes us feel they’re doing their best to resist that fatal pull. Like a skilled Irish bard (and to leaven the grimness of his characters’ impoverished circumstances), Byrne summons up gypsies, ghosts and banshees who add mystery and a whiff of transcendence to his raucous, heartfelt story.

For readers offended by profanity and drug use, fair warning that both are plentiful in this novel. Yet to soften those elements would have been to deal falsely with the tribe of puzzling and sometimes infuriating characters who swirl in a giddy dance through Denny’s days. Byrne admirably captures their ethos and the language they use to express it, and if their actions aren’t always praiseworthy, there’s a truth in the telling that makes Ghosts & Lightning both engaging and memorable. For all their flaws, it’s likely you’ll find yourself rooting for Denny and his pals to find their footing, despairing all the while that they’ll do so anytime soon.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.