Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding: College Baseball as an Allegory for American National Greatness

Recent American realism embodies a quiescent prose style emphasising the inborn virtues of a citizenry outside time and history. The Art of Fielding employs this pacifying prose style, whose prominent predecessors include Alice Newbold and Claire Messud, to empty the genres of the campus novel, the baseball novel, and the gay novel of any subversiveness. Harbach idealises athletic competition and offers Westish College as a model polity, while characters like the gifted shortstop Henry Skrimshander and college president Guert Affenlight are imbued with an ethereal grace serving as a prescription for Amertica’s salvation after its recent skirmishes with the messiness of history.