Books: Michael Bishop’s “Brittle Innings”
Posted by Jim at July 13th, 2005
Though I enjoy watching baseball, I’m not a fanatic. By not a fanatic, I mean that I enjoy going to baseball games and occasionally watching it on television, but I don’t really have a favorite team and if you asked for any player’s stats I’d have to look them up.
Honestly, I’m more likely to read a book than go to a game. In fact, relatives of mine will recount one time that I actually read a book all the way to the game, during the game, and probably did my best to read it on the way home. I don’t know what the book was (it may have been The Mote in God’s Eye), but I’m pretty sure that the White Sox were playing the New York Yankees.
For better or worse, this means that I can enjoy the occasional baseball influenced novel. Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings follows the story of Danny Boles, a rookie shortstop on a minor league baseball team during World War II.
First off, I’ll just mention that I like the writing of Michael Bishop a lot. He’s one of my favorite science fiction writers. He pays a lot of attention to the creation of good characters as opposed to good physics. He has written stories that include aliens, but in the end, his stories about aliens end up exploring what it means to be human. Though he’s written stories set on other planets, the state of Georgia dominates his books. His writing style can be geuninely beautiful.
In short, it’s at least as accurate to describe him as a southern fiction writer as it is to describe him as a science fiction writer.
Brittle Innings is (at least in theory) not a science fiction novel. If you find it, you’ll find it in the general fiction section. This represents the book reasonably well. Someone who doesn’t read science fiction will be able to read it. They’ll be especially likely to enjoy it if they like baseball–as Michael Bishop evidently does.
However… It’s fiction written by a guy who normally writes science fiction which means that odd things are in store for the theoretical average reader who comes across the book expecting something like Shoeless Joe (inspiration for the movie Field of Dreams).
I have no idea how such a reader will respond to one of the major premises of the book: the idea that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a true story. What that reader will do when he or she realizes that Frankenstein’s monster is playing minor league baseball under an assumed name is entirely unpredictable, but the Publisher’s Weekly review on Amazon probably reflects exactly that situation.
Whatever the case, I’m someone who constantly reads science fiction and I love the book. I reread it most summers.
It’s a great window into the 1940’s in rural Georgia, paying attention to such diverse issues as race, World War II, relationships between fathers and sons, and old monster movies.
Trust me, this blog entry doesn’t do it justice.
I once read a book through a baseball game. I still feel bad about it, because my dad, grandpa, and uncle drove down to see the game with me.
Topher
Kids do that sort of thing though. Especially kids who are more oriented toward books and ideas than they are human beings. At least that’s probably why I did that. I can’t speak for you.
Jim Zoetewey
I used to do the same thing to my parents all the time. My dad would take the family all over the place on vacations and I’d spend most of the time engrossed in some novel. He would get frustrated about it, and complain to my mother about my constant reading.
Ed Hand
Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. Always on the lookout for a good baseball-themed novel with a bit of weirdness to it.
And speaking of authors who write ostensibly mainstream novels that tend to the weird: ever read any Jonathan Carroll? He’s well worth looking into.
jonathan
I’ve never read anything by Jonathan Carroll. I’ll have to drop by the library and check his books out.
Jim Zoetewey