Spirits in the Grass (review)

A maxim of baseball fiction is that it has to be about something other than the game, and Meissner's novel fits this definition when it strives to portray smalltown life and address political issues surrounding the treatment of Native Americans. In spite of baseball's relative absence in the novel, the game makes up the center of Meissner's narrative: at age 37 Luke Tanner is looking to make a comeback for his town team of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Baseball thus serves as the motivation for his character as well as the source of conflict between him and his domestic partner, Louise Stiller.

Despite the relative lack of game action, Spirits in the Grass echoes earlier baseball novels. Meissner invokes the fiction of W. P. Kinsella when he has Luke working on the baseball field as a spiritual connection to his late father, who was a local baseball star in his own right. Louise, however, is no Annie to Luke's Ray, since she wants Luke to get on with his life and take her away from their small-town midwestern existence. By giving Luke a delayed bildungsroman narrative, designing his character around transitional values, and seeking to show how baseball can serve as the center of small-town culture, Meissner takes his book to deeper levels by plugging into the well-established baseball fiction formula first used by Noah Brooks almost 125 years earlier in Our Base Ball Club and How It Won the Championship. Although Luke's job at the local sod business does not offer him the opportunity to advance in the usual Horatio Alger mode, Luke looks to prove his ultimate maturity by demonstrating he can compete with the twenty year olds who are also trying out for the town team. To further demonstrate Luke's path toward maturity, Meissner has him ask Louise to marry him, but she wants him to be more in touch with his inner spirituality, which is very much in keeping with contemporary definitions of masculinity.

Meissner's book further echoes Our Base Ball Club when he shows how baseball is central to the culture of Clearwater. After Luke discovers Native American artifacts at the ball diamond and the chance to play the season is threatened, the town is more concerned about baseball than repatriating the bones. Much of this discussion of the game's importance takes place at the diner, which serves as the stage for Meissner to introduce several types of small-town local color (the know-it-all, the bigot, the "lawyer," the maternal waitress, etc.), and the conversation there brings out the conflicts between whites and the Native Americans who are operating a casino in the county The "Water-in Hole," a bar, and Jimbo's, a local eatery where one orders by phone even though Jimbo might be standing at the counter, both illustrate the kind of eccentric places one might find in the Midwest. Two more small-town local color types, Mayor Butch Sobieski and Sheriff Rollis, are developed in great detail by Meissner, and they both play a large role in the political drama that builds around the bone Luke found while working on the ballfield. Butch, who was a ballplayer before he was the mayor of "one of the best small towns in America," and Rollis, the lonely law enforcement officer with an inferiority complex, become embroiled in the cover-up of the bones and local land rights.

Except for Ring Lardner—who did not consider himself a serious writer until Jack Keefe had been relegated to the comic pages in the early 1920s—it has been difficult for novelists to write a pure baseball book. Bernard Malamud suffuses The Natural with mythical and historical levels so that writing professors would take him seriously. Coover, Kinsella, Brock, and Bishop all blend baseball with fantasy and fantastic elements, thus combining genres instead of telling a pure baseball story. Meissner borrows some of the supernatural from Kinsella and combines it with the political issues of...