Book Review: Leave the World Behind

Not every apocalypse needs to be a ridiculous, large, destructive spectacle.

That's one of the things I learned while reading Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.

As I'm in the middle of revising/pitching an apocalyptic book of my own, this came up as a possible comp title. I have the feeling this one, published in 2020, gets brought up a lot.

The plot here is simple: a family shows up at their rental home for summer vacation expecting to get away from it all. Their vacation, however, is interrupted when people claiming to be the rental property's owners show up and ask if they can stay.

The renters, a family of four, don't trust these new guests, a wealthy couple who also happen to be Black. Their initial distrust, rooted in at least some racial bias, eventually gives way as it becomes clear something is happening in the outside world. 

Image via Indianapolis Public Library

New York City has experienced a significant blackout, but the rental home still has power. The televisions no longer receive a signal and the internet is down, making it nearly impossible to decipher what's going on in the world at large. On multiple occasions, they hear military jets speeding overhead.

It's unclear what's causing all of this--including a strange deer migration--but the lack of clarity is the point. The world is coming apart at the seams, whether that's due to war or ecological disaster or economic collapse. It doesn't really matter. The family and homeowners must learn to trust one another if they have any hopes of surviving. That trust is not easily earned.

This book won't be everyone's cup of tea. The narrative takes its time, even in a relatively short book. Don't expect any explanations, just a lot of atmosphere and character work. The writing, to me, came off a little self-indulgent at times. It seemed like Alam wanted to let everyone knows about his expansive vocabulary. Some mundane detail work, in my opinion, is also a little overdone.

I'm also not sure I liked many of the characters. They are well drawn but seem to lack common sense or compassion. They come off as selfish, which I'm certain is a product of authorial intent, as the book explores themes of race, class, and consumer culture. I think it's worth reading, if just for the pervasive sense of dread and the quiet, resigned nature of a dying world.

Without a doubt, this is a novel that invites discussion (and judging by some of the reviews, a considerable amount of division!).

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 Indianapolis Public Library

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.