The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach: Review

In the mid-1990s, in Ohio, I had the pleasure of playing centerfield for the most unlikely of college baseball teams. We wore purple uniforms and played on a rock-strewn all-grass infield. Our first baseman was the smallest player on the team; our shortstop kept losing his glove at frat parties; and no one could make the throw from third. The pitching staff were an erudite lot, and mound conferences were as likely to feature poetry recitations as pitch sequencing.

My junior year, one reserve, citing exceptional balance, refused to buy cleats. He slipped when the first fly ball came his way, and the resulting inside-the-park home run marked the end of his brief career. That he was already on probation, having been among eight of us caught smoking pot during spring training in Florida, didn’t help. (When news of the drug bust reached campus, the grounds crew put in dirt base paths to stop all the grass jokes.) We lost most of our games, but ineptness was only partly to blame…

Reading the Detective: A profile of Red on Red author Edward Conlon

In the fall of 1997, The New Yorker published the first in a series of remarkable personal narratives that came to be known as the “Cop Diary” columns. Penned by (a surely pseudonymous) “Marcus Laffey,” they detailed in bold and clear-eyed prose the day-to-day life of a cop working in and amongst the sprawling housing projects of the South Bronx.

These were the Giuliani years, where the NYPD’s falling crime statistics were drowned out by sensational cases of brutality (Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo) and a tin-eared public face that made the world’s largest police department seem both unaccountable and out of touch. Laffey’s “Diaries” helped change all that.

Here were tales of all-night stakeouts and door-busting drug raids, but also smaller, heartfelt human dramas—well-meaning snitches, broken families fighting the odds, and at the center of it, a charming, if anonymous, police officer, battling crime, bureaucracy, and, occasionally even himself, as he walked his dangerous nightly beat. Laffey had succeeded where his superiors had so often failed; he’d given his profession a voice, and a lyrical one at that...

Then We Came to Book Two: A profile of The Unnamed author Joshua Ferris

In May of 2008, The New York Observer’s Choire Sicha penned an emasculating critique of America’s most celebrated young male novelists. The (slightly tongue-in-cheek) piece, entitled “ Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?” accused the young literary lights of going soft, as it were (Gawker quickly reacted with a post entitled, “Male Writer’s Having Trouble Getting it Up”).

Our latest crop of authors—Keith Gessen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dana Vachon, Jeff Hobbs, and Joshua Ferris, to name a few—were “malformed, self-centered boy-writers,” Sicha proclaimed, anti-Mailers who shied away from sex and controversy. They were scared of big themes and “ashamed of ambition.” Their female counterparts were tougher. The article became an online sensation…

My Afternoon with a Dominatrix: A profile of Whip Smart author Melissa Febos

Forgive me. I am about to write a thousand words about a young woman who moves to New York City to go to college (she wants to write, naturally), falls into a secret double-life of heroin addiction and S&M dungeons, then lives not only to sober up and tell the tale, but to sell that tale to a major publishing house. The result is the memoir, Whip Smart, by Melissa Febos, and in an attempt to ward off the reflexive eye-rolling some readers may be experiencing, I’m going to break a major rule of criticism and start by quoting the last lines of the book…

The Great Recession Novel: A profile of Union Atlantic author Adam Hasslett

Does this sound familiar?

“These new mortgages were being fed into the banks like cars into a chop shop, stripped for parts by Union Atlantic and the other big players, and then securitized and sold on to the pension funds and the foreign central banks.”

Or this?

“The system, in the public eye, was still strong, people’s faith in the value of the money in their pocket such a basic fact of life they couldn’t imagine it otherwise. And yet if you’d been on the calls with the Ministers of Finance or with Treasury… you knew it could have gone differently. One more piece of bad news and the invisible architecture of confidence might have buckled.”

“I want to know about the world we’re living in,” he says. “And I want to know how people cope with the world we’re living in.”

But for the fictional bank—and the first-rate prose—these passages might have come from any one of the dozens of recent rushed-to-print books endeavoring to explain the great financial collapse of our time. Of course, that’s not the case. They’re from Adam Haslett’s unsettlingly prescient debut novel Union Atlantic, and what makes them extraordinary is this: They were written long before the fall of 2008...