The Art of Fielding is such a fun book. It’s about baseball, and the enjoyment of reading it is very similar in feeling to the enjoyment of going to a baseball game. There’s drama and suspense and you learn things about characters that you come to care about. Sometimes things can take a somewhat dark turn, but nothing ever gets too too bad and most of the time when you put the book down for the night, you’re going to bed happy rather than stressed out.

The cover of the novel contains blurbs from Jonathan Franzen and John Irving, and the novel is similar in a lot of ways to the books those authors tend to write – particularly John Irving. The baseball game in which a play goes disastrously wrong reminded me of a similar scene in Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the writing and narrative styles have a lot of similarities as well. I’m a big fan of John Irving, so as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing.

There are a lot – a lot – of references to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in this novel. The references are sometimes explicitly part of the plot (most of the action takes place at a college Melville once visited; the baseball team is called the Harpooners) and sometimes more subtle. After I was done reading the book, I spent a fair amount of time wondering why the author had chosen to intertwine his novel with Moby Dick in the way he had. In fact, I even picked up Moby Dick off my bookshelf and am in the process of re-reading it for the first time in years. By the way, that’s another thing I love about this book – the way, when I was done with it, I wanted nothing more than to read another book that might inspire similar feelings in me.

Anyway the most obvious connection that leaps to mind between Moby Dick and The Art of Fielding is that both are sort of about the single-minded pursuit of something. Ahab’s after the white whale. Fielding’s protagonist, a college shortstop named Henry Skrimshander, is trying to achieve perfection in baseball – errorless game after errorless game. For both of them, their obsession eventually destroys them, in a sense (though I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Henry’s destruction is much less total than Ahab’s, the sort of thing he can and perhaps eventually does recover from). Many of the characters, actually, are pursuing something, and Henry is not the only one who realizes too late that their pursuits have led them to a bad end. Again, this is not a depressing book by any means and most of the characters in this novel have at least the promise of things turning out ok for them, but the same sort of thread is there as you see in Moby Dick, just on smaller scales.

Both books, too, are sort of about the relationship of men with each other, how men interact and bond and form friendships and fight and fall in love and all that stuff. There’s a scene in Fielding that sort of gives this part of the similarity away, with a female character thinking about how weird men are with their rites of friendship and forgiveness. It’s hard to think of a more male-dominated environment than a whaling boat in the 1800s or a (men’s) sports team today. I’m sure there are other connections as well, but like I say it’s been a long time since I’ve read Moby Dick. Maybe I’ll have some more thoughts about it after I’ve finished re-reading it.

In the meantime, whether you like baseball or not is not of much relevance to whether you will like The Art of Fielding. The writing is great, the characters are believable, and the plot is compelling. Most of all, though, it’s just nice to read a book once in a while that you can put down feeling unambiguously good about having experienced it.