Going the Distance by Michael Joyce (review)

In our clearer-sighted moments, of course, we know there is no magic in baseball. Despite earnest magic realists intent on coating the national pastime with a thick patina of pixie dust, we know there really is no compelling spaciousness to the tight confines of a baseball field. If you were to jerry-rig a baseball field in some nondescript cornfield in, say, mid-Iowa, you might interest the local little-league team but not the thunder ghosts of Chicago’s Black Sox. Despite the legacy of baseball fictions that regularly traffic in the paranormal, baseball is actually played by men and women, at once heroic and imperfect, who deal with the hammer-strike intrusion of bad luck and the unexpected largesse of good fortune while making their way through the unpredictability of relationships, ultimately succumbing to the body’s grinding concessions to time, all the while agonizingly aware of the gravitational pull of mortality. They are, in fact, pretty much like the rest of us, save they can work a ball. There are no Yoda-managers or oracle-scouts; no exotic goddess-muses enchanting the bleachers; and no miracle bats. Not every ragtag collection of misfits melds into a championship team. The field of dreams is, as it turns out, more a field of seems.

I mention this only because the opening set piece of Michael Joyce’s marvelous tour de force Going the Distance appears all too familiar. Jack Flynn, a pitching wunderkind who achieved fleeting celebrity for two championship seasons, is edging now into life after the game, his career threatened by a painful shoulder injury. It is midsummer, and Flynn has returned home to upstate New York. He is accompanied by a mysterious woman, at once supernal and carnal, a woman he does not know (cue the theremin). She is there, we are sure, to serve as his guide out of the depths, another avatar of the mysterious muse-angel (see Glenn Close or Susan Sarandon) sent by unknown cosmic energies to salvage an aging athlete. Joyce certainly knows his magic baseball fiction—he plays on such expectations. But if he knows his Malamud and his Kinsella, he knows his Faulkner far better. Rather than the clichés of magic realism, we get a dense, deliberately conceived excavation into a wounded man executed in a supple, lyric prose line in which everyday objects lift effortlessly into the symbolic, a tale of a terrified man who finds himself at a crossroad, compelled finally in the dark woods of midlife to grapple with his past. Here is a deftly executed reconstruction of the emotional life—nonlinear and fragmentary, yes, but subtly coaxed into a satisfying portrait of a fascinating character, a man-child who happens to be an athlete, trapped, as we all are, in the heartbreaking impermanence of is.

Completed more than twenty years ago, the text existed for years in the eccentric ether of digital archives, available as a download, where it occasioned generous plaudits. When the editors of Excelsior Editions, a trade imprint of the State University of New York Press, wisely released it in late 2013 as a handsome paperback edition, the book found a second life, ultimately being shortlisted for Spitball magazine’s prestigious Casey Award, which annually recognizes the best in baseball fiction. Although it is interested in broader ideas, the book surely succeeds amply as baseball fiction. Joyce, a distinguished academic, commands the imaginative brio to inhabit his jock, to re-create with stunning immediacy game moments (particularly Flynn’s single disastrous World Series mound appearance) as well as the goofy optimism of a young talent, the first brush with the magnitude of making it to the pros, and then the inevitable struggle with the body’s sudden surrender to mediocrity. The story line of Flynn’s love-hate relationship with a charismatic hitter named Wolfman, which culminates with Wolfman charging the mound when Flynn costs him a consecutive at-bat hits record, is as engaging as it is psychologically...