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A daily record of what I'm thinking about what I'm reading

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Friday, November 18, 2011

Why Henry can't throw: The Art of Fielding

Pretty close to the end of Chad Harbach's "The Art of Fielding" and I'm glad to see that college prez Affenlight gets what's coming to him - or what we all could see and he could not: he is obviously jeopardizing him job right from the beginning as this 60+ college prez begins a relationship with one of the students. Hello? Is it possible that Affenlight wouldn't realize the impropriety of this? Is it possible he wouldn't see how the board of trustees or for that matter his campus rivals would use this to oust him - or much worse? The whole Affenlight angle is to me a distraction in this otherwise pretty strong novel (not because it's a gay relationship, I don't care about that one way or the other - same plot demise could have and would have developed had the student lover been a woman - in fact, we are expected, I think, to have more sympathy for him because he's a just-emerging gay man - had he been with a woman student we would have seen him as more of a lech and a predator but in this case we seem him as more of a pathetic old man, an Aschenbach) - but I'm much more interested in the main story line about the baseball team as it moves toward a national championship and as the shortstop and central character to the novel, Henry, comes to terms with his sudden, inexplicable ability to throw. Maybe the inexplicable will be explained in the last chapters? Please don't attribute this failure to a repressed homoerotic desire or anything so simplistic or reductive. Some things can't be explained - they just are.

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