Really?

A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year.  Critical acclaim from serious authors and reviewers. The New Yorker loved it.  Lots of play in the publishing world.  All over the bookstores.

Chad Harbach’s first novel, ‘The Art of Fielding’, made a big splash.  I must be missing something.  It’s a pleasant enough read,  but overall it comes across as a book for the young adult reader. And it probably wouldn't succeed there either. Lots of baseball in the plot.  A team to root for.  A championship game. A shortstop who thinks himself into trouble.    Off-the-field action which includes romance, parents, a college president, gay themes, alcohol.  There’s nothing wrong with having young characters act like young people, but here we have pretty much all characters (both young and old) viewed through the eyes of young (not so experienced or insightful) people.  That’s a pretty shallow and uninteresting perspective, and not at all what I expected.

Now here's a shortstop

Yes, there are some interesting literary references.  Nice to see serious and literature and sports mixed in the same book.  The writing itself is serviceable, occasionally clever, but never beautiful, inspiring, or original.  The plot presents one totally implausible event after another.  Sorry, but things just don’t happen that way in real life, and this tries to be a totally realistic book.  There are no fantasy elements or literary pretenses that ask us to suspend disbelief.  It’s life viewed by a 15-year-old, and not a particularly smart one at that.  There’s just way too much packed into the plot, and none of it gets the deeper more considered treatment that it deserves.  Characters are empty vessels for the demands of the plot.  None of it is convincing from an emotional viewpoint.

I just don’t get it.  It’s pleasant enough.  I would have enjoyed it on the beach 45 years ago.

Sorry to be negative.  It’s pretty unusual for me to be so disappointed.  I choose my reading carefully and I’m conscientious about finding the rewarding aspects of what I read.  Came up pretty much empty here.

There’s always next season.