For a while now I've been reading some of the books on John Cartan's list of 20 strange books. This makes the 8th one I've read (3rd I've discovered from the list), and they all deserve a place on The Curious Bookshelf. This one, especially so.
J. Henry Waugh, the eponymous proprietor, has invented a baseball game played with dice. In his regular life, he's an accoutant who hates his job. But the game -- the game is more real to him than life. Because he has not only created a game, he has created the players. They have names, characters, history, relationships, politics, sex, songs, a complex world of the imagination that any rivals any novelist's.
As you'd expect, Henry's real life and the game life begin to collide. When the rules of the game run contrary to his own deepest desires, the novel really begins to get interesting. I'm still noodling over what happens in the last chapter.
If you're a fan of metafiction, this is a book to buy. Would make an interesting pair with The Dice Man, which I haven't read in many years.
| The Curious Bookshelf | Baseball |
Michael, this reminds me (oddly? mebbe not...) of Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel," a brilliant piece of fiction about the pursuit of the aforesaid GAN, written within the context of a major baseball league which the major leagues deny ever existed. Riffing on the great not yet achieved GAN, it builds in hilarious whiffs of Moby Dick, Winseburg OH and I can't remember what all else. I remember all sorts of gut wrenching laughs when I read it many years ago, but I was so much older then.
Comment #1 :: link :: June 16, 2006 10:32 PMi love this book. don't know why, but in my mental file drawer, it's sitting next to Crying of Lot 49
Comment #2 :: link :: June 23, 2006 02:19 PMThere are parallels to Strat-O-Matic baseball, a dice game I played as a kid. I still have many of the original 1966 player cards my dad bought for me when I was 7.
Glenn Guzzo wrote "Strat-O-Matic Fanatics: The Unlikely Success Story Of A Game That Became An American Passion," and he mentions Coover's novel in discussing SOM fanatics. The chapter "Love, Devotion and Surrender, starts:
"Strat-O-Matic fanatic Hank Smith senses a kinship with J. Henry Waugh, the fictional character who was earger to leave his unfulfilling job each day to enter the world he created and ruled over -- a world where success and failure, heroics and even death were dictated by the rolls of dice in a table-top baseball game."
I did much the same for many years, through high school, and a little bit when the Mets got good again in the 80's.
Comment #3 :: link :: June 24, 2006 09:41 AM
