The art of fielding summary PDF

Preview

Summary

Samenvatting voor VS3 - Te lezen boeken tijdens semester drie...

Description

Men & Masculinity Baseball is inherently masculine in the world of The Art of Fielding. The training, weight lifting, and game playing all seem to revolve around showing how much testosterone the guys all have. In The Art of Fielding, homosexuality does not negate masculinity. Contrary to the stereotypes, this book proves that it is possible to be both masculine and homosexual, or to display homosexual desires.

Competition The Art of Fielding teaches us that it's not whether you win or lose… actually, no, it is whether you win or lose and, dangit, you better win. If you don't win, you are nothing, a loser. (Maybe this is why Henry cracks under pressure.) The Art of Fielding also shows academics as a sort of competitive game, with both Guert (in his college days) and Mike (in his applying-to-college days) trying, and sometimes failing, to make big plays. Persistence pays off, but one big fumble (like sleeping with a student) can ruin everything.

Inertia Baseball as a sport rarely makes any major changes, so thematically it makes sense for The Art of Fielding to feel like one big never-ending, never-changing game of ball. The only thing that progresses slower than baseball is academia, as evidenced by Affenlight's struggles to make Westish a greener campus. We have to note his lack of action was part of the problem, until Owen came along.

Jealousy Many times jealousy is seen as a feminine emotion—like women being jealous of other women's looks or clothes—but in The Art of Fielding, Pella, the sole female character, feels much less jealousy than the men in the book do, especially her soon-to-be ex-husband. Mike should be proud of Henry, but his own ideas of masculinity and being the best mean that he feels inferior when Henry surpasses him. The student has become the master.

Admiration Henry is not used to being admired. He's used to looking up to other people. So when people start thinking he's the best, Henry cracks under the pressure to be the best. He can't live up to the admiration. Mike, on the other hand, finds something he admires (like Henry) and exploits it in a way that later makes him feel guilty.

Community What makes a community? Some of the factors include having a clear set of goals, being flexible, and being a reliable support group. They forgot snazzy uniforms, but no list is perfect. A baseball team like the Westish Harpooners could fulfill most of these requirements, plus the snazzy uniforms that we don't think should be optional. When they're at their best, they support each other, they cover

different positions on the team, and they have the same goal: win. When they don't fulfill these requirements, that's when things start to fall apart. Were it not for baseball, most of these men probably wouldn't be part of the same community. For many of them, baseball is the only common interest they share. The desire for community is strong in all the characters—the players have their team and Guert has his college—but Pella doesn't really have a community of her own. Maybe that's why she goes back to school at the end of the book—to belong.

Drugs and Alcohol And yet, The Art of Fielding has nary a mention of steroids, maybe because this is college baseball and not the big leagues. That doesn't mean its players are all sober, though. Instead of pumping up before the game, they deal with pain after the game by medicating themselves with pills and booze. We're not sure which is worse. Pella also has a tendency to turn to alcohol when things go wrong, so she and Mike have this trait in common. People tend to drink or abuse drugs when under extreme pressure. With these characters being both on a sports team and in college, we're surprised more of them don't have a problem.

Literature and Writing At some point during the novel, all of our major characters relate to a book—Henry has The Art of Fielding, Mike studies for his dissertation, Pella purchases a book with her first paycheck, and Guert built his entire career on Melville. Books are important to all of them. But, on the flip side, books and literature have their place, and people's refusal to put them down has consequences. We don't just mean Owen getting smacked by a baseball, either. Henry's blind devotion to The Art of Fielding actually sets him up for failure, and Guert's early focus on Melville defines him and his college and puts them both in a rut.

Baseball This might not be a book about baseball—characters are off the field far more often than they're on it —but baseball plays a huge role in their lives. First and foremost, Henry's entire life is baseball. He wouldn't be at Westish without it. Instead, he'd still living at home in South Dakota with his best friend: a baseball glove named Zero. It's also doubtful if Owen and Affenlight would have gotten together had Henry not hit Owen in the face with a baseball and brought Guert and Owen together in the hospital. Pella wouldn't have met Mike if he hadn't been depressed on the steps of the athletic center, either. So, even though Guert doesn't even like baseball—"Baseball—what a boring game! One player threw the ball, another caught it, a third held a bat. Everyone else stood around" (8.10)—it defines his life and those of the people around him, which is surprising since Westish isn't even a sports school. On the flip side, Guert might still be alive were it not for all this stress, so maybe if he'd been more focused on making Westish environmentally friendly instead of improving the baseball team, he wouldn't have died. Just as you can't redo a baseball game, there's no way to redo these lives and find out.

CHARACTERS

Henry Skrimshander - From Zero to Hero Henry Skrimshander doesn't whittle things for sailors, but maybe he would if he were born in a different century. Instead, he's living in a post-Doubleday world, and everything he does, he does for love of the game. "He's only ever wanted to play baseball" (2.12) we're told, and that's pretty much all he does. Henry goes from a small-town baseball player to a recordbreaking college hero to… well, kind of back where he started—a 360-degree turn that happens so fast, it can make your head spin. So keep your eye on the ball while we talk about Henry's journey, an arc more dramatic than a hanging curveball. Henry is first described through Mike Schwartz's eyes as "a scrawny novelty of a shortstop" (1.1). He's a zero, but for good reason: he's made zero errors in the game. He's so proud of his zero, he names his baseball glove Zero. His well-worn glove is talked about so much, it would be a symbol except for the fact that it disappears around chapter 3, never to be seen again. But maybe that's the point, because his zero-streak disappears too. Henry's zero streak lasts a bit longer than the glove, though. He manages to tie the streak of his idol, Aparicio Rodriguez, but then… he chokes (and we don't mean like Mama Cass). "In thirty-one games he didn't make a single error" (5.91). Then, he can't stop making them. What gives?

I Am Error Henry's first error goes unnoticed by officials, because it's the throw that hits Owen in the face and almost kills him. Henry, of course, notices this terrible mistake. It's hard not to notice a throw so bad it cracks your roommate in the face and gives him a concussion. Henry thinks he killed Owen right after the bad throw, and he seems to play every game thereafter as if someone else might die if he screws up again. He cracks under that pressure worse than Susan Boyle trying to sing live: "I keep seeing it over and over in my head. […] I've never made a throw like that. A throw that bad" (9.64). That's the start of pressure in Henry building up like an ice dam until the roof caves in. "Don't overthink it," Henry is told. "Just let it fly" (23.3). But he can't stop thinking. "You couldn't choose to think or not think" (44.24), he says. Adding to the pressure are the scouts calling him and prospective offers from major league teams building up. Henry feels like he has to be perfect, and if he can't be perfect, he doesn't want to be. This is Henry's philosophy: "You improved little by little till the day it all became perfect and stayed that way. Forever" (54.12). Unable to be perfect, Henry ends up quitting in the middle of a game.

Play Ball After Henry quits, it's a struggle to get him back into the game. Mike shows him videos of how he evolved from "a scrawny novelty of a shortstop" (1.1) into a brawny novelty of a shortstop. He's graceful. He has skill. But he's still not perfect.

After being a recluse in Pella's apartment and peeing in bottles for a few weeks (hey, at least he doesn't drink it like J.D. Salinger did), he sees that the Harpooners are able to make it to the championship without him. That might be an ego blow to others, but we think to Henry it's a relief. The entire success of the team doesn't depend on him. He can be a part of a team, instead of Henry the Perfect. A series of injuries in the final game forces Henry to take the bat. Will he strike out, like mighty Casey? No. Henry strangely decides to take a bunt with his head—on purpose. If he doesn't want to think, that's one way to do it, we guess. Maybe he also did it as a bit of self-punishment for doing the same to Owen. Whatever the reason, the Harpooners win. Yay! And Henry is drafted by his favorite team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Double yay! Well… not so fast. Remember how we mentioned "He's only ever wanted to play baseball" (2.12)? Being a Major League superstar like Charlie Sheen is still too much for Henry to handle. He decides to stay at Westish and only play college ball. What do you think Henry will do after graduation?

Mike Schwartz - Magic Mike Mike Schwartz is the catcher for the Harpooners. He's good at coaching and catching, but not much else. When we first meet Mike, he's unnecessarily cruel to Henry, a shortstop he's never met on the opposing team. Henry can't hit the ball, so "Schwartz said—ever so softly, so that it would seem to come from inside [Henry's] own skull—'pussy'" (1.5). Mike soon witnesses how good Henry is at playing shortstop. When he sees that he can use Henry for his own personal gain, he recruits him to Westish and gets him on the baseball team. We're told, "Now that he'd seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn't let it walk away" (1.12) and "When he wanted something [he] took immediate steps to acquire it" (1.28). This is a protagonist we're supposed to like? Henry starts college at Westish and, unsurprisingly, is ignored until Mike needs him. Then, to Mike's credit, he grooms Henry into a stellar baseball player. He teaches Henry to lift weights and to eat SuperBoost Nine Thousand to build muscle. They train together non-stop. And Mike starts a fight with the other shortstop to get that dude suspended so Henry can play. But, as we've seen up to this point, Mike is doing all this not because he likes Henry, but because he wants to win. At some point, though, that changes. Mike yells at the umpire who marks Henry's failed throw an error, even though neither Mike nor the Harpooners have anything to gain by Henry's statistics. Maybe he does care about Henry and his record. "Get a new streak started" (23.25), he says, offering Henry encouraging words. When did Mike go from opportunist to friend? Pain Reliever Being a catcher is inherently self-destructive. It's an essential position—catching the ball and, metaphorically, catching all the players as they fall. But it's one that requires the player

to squat constantly, putting huge stress on his knees. As a result, Mike is addicted to pain pills. Or, at least, it seems that way. He magically gets over his dependence with no trouble whatsoever about two-thirds through the book, so maybe he's making a bigger deal of the pain than it actually is. This self-destructive tendency of Mike's spills over to other things, though. He's a wonderful coach, but he disparages his own skills, saying, "Those who cannot do, coach" (34.108). And when Henry starts to achieve success, Mike is jealous of it. Mike himself isn't successful, not getting into any law schools, but as Pella points out, "Why'd he only apply to six schools? The six best schools in the country? It makes no sense" (55.28). She believes he did this as yet another method of self-destruction. In the end, even though Mike told himself "He had no art to call his own" (66.11)—as opposed to Henry and his art of fielding—Mike realizes that coaching is an art, and he embraces his calling, taking a position as Westish assistant coach. We hope that's a lot easier on the knees.

Pella Affenlight - Natural Disaster Pella was an ancient Greek city destroyed by an earthquake. When we meet Pella Affenlight, she has ditched her disaster of a marriage and is attempting to rebuild the ruins of her life. It's a challenge, seeing how she dropped out of high school (which she was still attending at age nineteen for some reason) to marry David, a 31-year-old architect. That didn't work out. She was "helplessly depressed she depended on him" (10.10) and tired of "enduring the sheer excruciating boredom of being alive" (10.11). David is a Grade-A creeper whose "sense of humor was awkward and mechanical, as if he'd learned it from a book" (42.11). He's the opposite of Pella, we guess, who finds lines like "You're only Jung once" (10.5) to be the peak of comedy. He's insanely jealous, although we only have her word for it because we only see them interact in the book once. At the end of this interaction, Pella swallows a sapphire earring to make a statement, so maybe she is the crazy one. It's difficult to talk about Pella without also talking about her relationship to the men in her life. She's defined by her relationships with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, with her dad (whom she finds out is gay, but is completely fine with that in about two pages), and with Mike Schwartz. She's attracted to Mike Schwartz probably because, like him, she has a tendency to ignore people until she needs them. (She dumped her own dad from her life when she replaced him with David, yet ran back to her dad four years later when she got tired of being married.) Also, she has this extreme dislike of beards because her ex-husband had one, and she hates that Mike has one. (Other things Mike Schwartz and Pella's ex- have in common: they both have a penis, they both eat food, they both breathe…) When Pella's dad dies, one of her first thoughts is that she's glad Mike shaved his beard. "Let it never be bearded again" (81.2), she thinks, looking at Mike's face, while her dad's corpse is in the boat nearby. That's what's disturbing to her in this situation—a beard.

Dishpan Hands "[Pella] hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights" (14.54). Got it. So let's talk about Pella's own insights. Pella's biggest crisis in the book is whether or not to do it on the first date, and by "it" we mean, "the dishes." Within the span of a few paragraphs, we're told "She was feeling a strong desire to wash the dishes" (20.7) and "She really, really wanted to wash dishes" (20.10). She's just had her first date with Mike Schwartz, and she can't wait to get her hands in his… sink. Yes, Pella ends up doing the dishes. And then she goes to the school cafeteria and gets a job doing—what else?—the dishes. It's a way of her putting her life in order as she tries to figure out what she wants to do. She often wonders what's so magical about Henry, asking him, "So what's it like to be the best?" (29.50). Pella should know, because she's the best dishwasher in the Central Time Zone. Pella grows a bit, deciding she'd love to learn to cook and open a restaurant. She even makes a breakfast and a soup. Mostly, though, the men around her dictate her life—whether it's cheating on Mike with Henry (and developing absolutely no emotional attachment to Henry in the process) or her dad's death. It's Pella's baffling decision to exhume her father's body and dump it in a lake that closes her book. She thinks digging up her father's corpse is a perfect idea because of his e-mail password, "landlessness" (78.47)—which is a bad password because it lacks a capital, a number, and a symbol (L4nd!355n355 would be so much more secure). None of this seems to faze her, though. Perhaps Pella should quit her culinary training and go to mortuary school.

Guert Affenlight - Affenlight Casts Four Shadows Guert Affenlight, Pella's father, is the Westish College president who engages in a relationship with a male student almost forty years his junior—and then dies. We're not sure how to pronounce Guert (Gert? Gwert? Bob?) but we have to wonder if it means "foreshadowing" in whatever heritage he is. It's difficult to see Guert among all the foreshadows he casts early on. His office is decorated with two signs—"NO SUICIDES PERMITTED HERE" (7.2) and "NO SMOKING IN THE PARLOR" (7.2). And, although Guert doesn't commit suicide by jumping off a building or shooting himself or taking pills, he pretty much kills himself with his smoking. He must have missed the page after page about his family's history of heart disease and all the little bits of wordplay that served as big neon arrows pointing their way toward death, like: "Perhaps, he thought, with a touch of melodrama, this whole thing was merely an old man's last gasp" (8.35). This line pretty much sums up Guert's final months. It's melodramatic, and a "last gasp," because the stress of the relationship with Owen (and the smoking; just say no!) ends up killing him.

Sperm Squeezer The Sperm-Squeezers isn't just the title of the book Guert wrote about Herman Melville, it's also a thinly-veiled reference to what he and Owen get up to behind closed doors. For sixty years he hasn't had a gay bone in his body—"Entangling with a male student had never crossed his mind" (9.54)—but then Owen comes along ( pun intended, as this pun is used so many times in the book that we lost count) and Guert can't wait to entangle appendages with him. There's a lot of conflict here. We have the age difference. We have the fact that Guert is a college president and Owen is a student—Guert once thought of his daughter's husband as a "borderline pedophile" (39.1) but, since the age difference between himself and Owen is almost four times the size, his "moral indignation had cooled recently" (39.2). Finally, we have Guert's sexuality. Is he heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or just Owensexual? None of this conflict is resolved because the school's board of trustees catches Guert, and then he literally curls up and dies. Besides Henry and his own brain, and Pella and dishes, the biggest conflict in this novel is whether or not Owen and Guert's relationship will survive. It doesn't, because Guert doesn't, and we never find out how the consequences of being caught may have affected them.

Owen Dunne - The Big O Don't get it twisted, Shmoopers, Owen Dunne is not one of those tortured gay athletes hiding in his gym locker. He introduces himself to Henry by saying, "I'll be your gay mulatto roommate" (2.72). Then, he introduces himself to the baseball team by saying, "I trust you don't object to having a gay man on your team" (4.74). He also uses words and phrases like "Verily" (5.32) and "We exhort you" (5.34) with complete seriousness. Plus, at the beginning of the book, Owen has a boyfriend, Jason Gomes. We're told Owen writes plays and studies drama, but we never see him actually do any of that. He seems to have a busy social life, yet the only people who visit him in the hospital are the baseball team, his mom, and Guert. Owen talks and talks and talks about himself and never asks Henry any questions. He buys Henry clothes without asking what he wants, and only from a place where he "would never shop" (3.32) and to which he has a gift card. He has a BlackBerry (a strike against him) and "sigh[s], as if Henry were an annoying child" (2.85) when he first starts talking to him. And, for some reason, watching Henry stir powder into a glass of milk is the grossest thing he's ever seen. Maybe he's lactose intolerant? All drink preparatio...