Book Review: The Cactus League

I made a resolution this year to read more books. Part of this was because reading improves your writing. Part of it was because I found myself pretty deficient in the current marketplace. Part of it was that I needed comp titles for a book I wanted to pitch to agents.

The Cactus League (2020) by Emily Nemens came up as a possible contemporary comp because my work-in-progress explored the intersection of sports, character, and media.

Across its nine chapters, The Cactus League is about baseball, yet it's not. Each chapter tells a different story from a different point of view character. It all happens during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, for the Los Angeles Lions, a fictional MLB team. In the end, most of these narrative threads intersect.

Observing all of this is a sportswriter who provides a story-within-a-story of his own about Jason Goodyear, an absurdly talented baseball player whose gambling addiction derails his marriage and baseball career. Goodyear isn't the main character of the book, as there are many protagonists within the interlinked narrative, but he and his Lions are foundational to the story.

Image via Barnes & Noble

From the public's point of view, Goodyear is Baseball's Golden Boy, the next great superstar. Privately, however, he's a mess, indebted to loan sharks and even pilfering money from a rookie prospect who received a modest signing bonus.

The novel plays more like an interlinked anthology than anything, as the individual chapters tell stories from the points of view of different characters. While elements of the stories are connected, they're not obsessively interlinked, serving as side stories to the same overall narrative. I'm not explaining this very elegantly, but it works well enough.

At first, this approach threw me off. The first chapter is about a hitting coach who's back for spring training and discovers someone has broken into his house and lived there during the offseason. The next chapter follows a woman with a, let's just say "special," love of ballplayers. She encounters Goodyear and the two end up sneaking into Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, where Goodyear gets arrested after doing some property damage. 

Typically, you'd expect to come back to the Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 narrators as POV characters in the book, but that never happens. Subsequent chapters introduce new POV characters with new problems and plots. If a previous POV character reappears, they're a side character, a reference, or ancillary to the chapter's plot.

Some readers won't like this approach. Once I acclimated to it during the third chapter ("Oh, that's how this is going to go"), then I was fine with it. The individual stories are all well done, although I thought the sportswriter tangents were a bit much at times. 

The novel excels in its affection for baseball and spring training. You can tell Nemens is a baseball fan and most of the details land. There are some curiosities, like a pitcher who tosses a complete game in spring training, but overall, I think it's a searing double into the gap. Baseball is a ritual, and Nemens teases a lot of drama out of it.

On a personal level, it's neat that it was set in Scottsdale, Arizona, because that's where my wife and I went on our honeymoon about 20 years ago. Some of the sights and roads were familiar to me, and we actually visited Taliesin West on our trip.

Book Review: The Art of Fielding

 

Image via the Indianapolis Public Library

Baseball season is underway, and while the Reds are off to another tremendous start (a 3-0 loss to the Boston Red Sox on Opening Day), it seemed fitting to publish this review.

When it comes to sports fiction with a literary bent, you'll be hard-pressed to find many suggestions aside from The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.

This book was a sensation in 2011. It only took me 15 years to get around to reading it. 

The novel is about baseball. Growing up. College life. Relationships. The burden of expectations. The fear of success.

Henry Skrimshander is an immensely talented shortstop, a human vacuum cleaner with a rocket arm at the most challenging defensive position in the infield. Brought to Wisconsin's Westish College at the behest of his mentor and (mostly) friend Mike Schwartz, Henry excels at his craft. He's obsessed with a fictitious book called The Art of Fielding by equally fictitious MLB player Aparicio Rodriguez, one of the all-time great defensive shortstops.

Though slight in stature, Henry excels and attracts the attention of professional scouts, who travel from all around to the remote Wisconsin college to see the kid play. He eventually closes in on the errorless streak set by his hero (Rodriguez) before encountering the worst case of the yips ever recorded. Suddenly and without reason, Henry loses confidence. His first career error is a throw that sails wide of first base, clocking a teammate in the head as he sits in the dugout.

The error doesn't count thanks to a technicality (it ends up being a shortened game, and the results revert back to the previous inning, meaning Henry's error didn't happen), but Henry is a mess. While he's still a capable hitter, he can't throw the ball to first base, double- and triple-clutching as he tries in vain to do something he's done thousands of times before. He's Steve Blass and Chuck Knoblauch and Rick Ankiel and Steve Sax, all major leaguers who suddenly and inexplicably developed "the yips," the inability to locate the strike zone and/or make routine throws.

He can't escape that moment. The perfection he chased, and the big-league interest he attracted, are gone. Henry's not humbled. He's humiliated and eventually hangs up his cleats. In the meantime, the Westish Harpooners, a perpetual punching bag in their conference, make an unlikely championship run with their best player sidelined by doubt and inutility.

Various subplots include Henry's strained mentor-mentee relationship with Schwartz, the team captain and catcher who creaks when he walks and finds comfort in various painkillers and sedatives; the tragic relationship between college president Guert Affenlight and an exceptional male student named Owen (at first a rarely used player on Henry's and Schwartz's team and also Henry's gay roommate); and Schwartz's growing attraction to Affenlight's daughter, Pella.

This is a sprawling, lengthy novel (maybe even slightly overstuffed) that demands a lot from the reader. The text can be dense, filled with literary allusions and wordplay. It is definitely a literary novel that screams "I'm a literary novel that's not just about baseball but existential stuff, too!" Overall, though, the small college setting and baseball scenes won me over.

I do think Henry is a bit of a cipher. You like the kid and you root for him, but you just don't feel like you know much about him. Other characters, especially Schwartz, are more convincingly drawn. It also overreaches at times and becomes bogged down in its many subplots, stealing momentum away from the main narrative.

That said, it's a memorable book with solid characters and, at times, some inspired humor. Let's call it a ground rule double. 

Book review: Project Hail Mary

Image via Wikipedia

This will contain spoilers for the book (and, by extension, the movie adaptation)

Project Hail Mary is the third novel from Andy Weir, following The Martian and Artemis. While I've read The Martian, I haven't read Artemis. 

The Martian told the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars who's forced to use his wits and scientific knowledge to survive. You'll find a lot of that DNA in Project Hail Mary.

Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship, his thoughts in complete disarray. He can neither remember his name nor his mission. Two other people on the ship are dead, and he has no idea who they are. Slowly but surely, at key points, Grace recalls the critical moments that brought him to the ship, Hail Mary, and the urgency of his mission.

The sun is dying, beset by a mysterious, sun-altering phenomenon known as the "astrophage." Unless Grace can find a way to stop the blight, the sun's light will diminish and Earth will cool to cataclysmic temperatures, first ending life as we know it, and then, all life entirely. It will be a cruel, slow process.

The flashbacks show how Grace came to the attention of Eva Stratt, the administrator of a global effort to study the astrophage, to help other scientists understand the organism and how to combat it. We also learn Grace is no trained astronaut--he's a middle school science teacher who once had grand ambitions as a scientific researcher.

The project to save humanity, "Project Hail Mary," intends to send a team of astronauts to Tau Ceti, the only star within traveling distance that doesn't seem to be affected by the astrophage. By studying Tau Ceti, Earth's greatest minds hope they can find a way to stop or contain the astrophage. What unique characteristics does that star have? Are they something that can be translated to Earth?

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE BOOK AND MOVIE

While getting his bearings, Grace notices another blip on the scopes. As it turns out, he's not alone--another ship is also in the system, ostensibly to study Tau Ceti. He ends up making contact with an alien species, a landmark occurrence, and tries to understand a mysterious visitor who appears to be able to build anything.

After some back and forth and some false starts, Grace befriends the extraterrestrial, which he dubs "Rocky" since he's essentially, for lack of a better term, a rock spider. Because of his divergent biology, Rocky sees the world very differently than Grace and communicates through harmonization/music. Grace, through much trial and error, creates a program that translates Rocky's vocalizations into English.

The two are there for the same reason: Rocky's home planet is also besieged by the astrophage. He's been in the Tau Ceti system for more than 40 (human) years and the rest of his crew died many years ago. Due to their planet's atmosphere, Rocky and his fellow Eridians didn't know anything about radiation or UV shielding, thus the other members of his crew died from radiation poisoning. While intelligent, the Eridians don't know about relativity. Rocky is a skilled, crafty engineer.

Eventually, the two discover a nearby planet (dubbed "Adrian" by Grace) has evolved a predator that can keep the astrophage at bay. Grace and Rocky collect a sample--both almost die in the process--and Grace begins developing strains of the predator (taumoeba) that he and Rocky can take to their respective homes to save their suns and prevent mass annihilation.

Humorous, science-based, and full of unexpected heart, Project Hail Mary is an absolute triumph. The relationship between Grace and Rocky is everything and you grow to care about both of them. Desperation brought them together, but the two form an inseparable bond. They laugh together, they bicker, they fuss, they weigh their options, and solve problems together. 

I just found it incredibly fun and moving.

The flashback structure works better in the book than the movie, giving Grace and Stratt more context and cohesion. We also learn the extreme lengths Stratt is willing to go to in order to make sure the mission is successful, something that is made apparent in the movie but is really hammered home in the novel.

If I had one narrative gripe, it's probably one of the final flashbacks in which we learn Grace refused to go on the mission voluntarily. I understand his reasoning--and I understand the message of the book is that we can become something greater, even if we don't expect it within ourselves--but it seemed like an unnecessary departure from the Grace we came to know throughout the course of the mission.

I saw it as a twist for the sake of a twist, but your mileage may vary.

I understand his reluctance and fear, I do, but I'd like to think, given the situation, he'd be more willing to rise to the occasion (ultimately, he does meet the moment) without being forced to go, especially when it's abundantly clear he's the best and only option at that point. A minor haggle, to be sure.

All in all, Project Hail Mary is a tremendously imaginative adventure. At its core, it's a story about a friendship forged through adversity, love, and brotherhood. Highly recommended--and the movie adaptation rocks.