Baseball has a place in the American psyche like that of cricket in the English – or the Australian - psyche. Maybe it’s more like the Indian. In any case, baseball represents a purer more innocent America, of freckle-faced children playing scratch games in the parks and yards before Mom calls them home for pot roast and apple pie, which is why scandals like the Black Sox throwing the World Series, or the more recent steroid scandals have the power to shock a jaded population.
Baseball figures heavily in American art, literature and movies; the Blocksox scandal is referenced in The Great Gatsby. Two of the most successful baseball movies I can recall were Field of Dreams and The Natural. The latter film changed the downbeat ending of the original Bernard Malamud novel to a crowd-pleasing upbeat ending, which I and millions of others loved. The former has the reputation of a film that makes men cry. Both films tap into something more than just baseball stories: father-son relationships, chasing a dream, second chances and greater powers beyond our rational world. Field of Dreams makes me cry, but it’s the character played by Burt Lancaster that does it. Lancaster is a small-town doctor who lost his first chance to play the big leagues as a kid, and abandons his mystical second chance to save a little girl’s life. Kevin Costner’s character says to him of his missed opportunity, his five minutes in the Major Leagues, that some men would consider it a tragedy. Lancaster replies ‘Son, if I had only gotten to be doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy’. That moment never fails to have me tearing up, even now as I write about it. My Dad, still alive and kicking, was a doctor and is a lifelong cricket fan and player, though he never threatened state or national selection. You would never mistake my Dad for Burt Lancaster, but the spirit of that line is one he would share.
Michael Chabon’s 2002 novel Summerland is an attempt to create a particularly American mythology based on mixing liberal doses of baseball with Native American and Norse mythology, and American folklore (and fakelore) aimed primarily at ‘young adults’. A boy, the worst baseball player in his little league (I had a lot of sympathy with him), joins forces with a girl from his team, an American baseball-playing fairy, a werefox , a sasquatch, a giant and a wererat - and others - to save his father and not one but three worlds from the destructive trickster Coyote. Even in that brief synopsis you can see the problem. Chabon tries to cram as much as he can into this long book but for me it never gels. The elements never quite mix and we are left with a lot of nice ideas, good characters and story elements that never coalesce into a satisfying whole. J R R Tolkein criticised C S Lewis for cramming too many mythologies carelessly into Narnia. If you can see the seams in Narnia, you can spot the fraying threads in Summerland.
Another major problem is baseball. A lot of the mythology Chabon creates centres on baseball but the game itself doesn’t have a function. A lot of baseball is played but little is achieved by doing so. At most, the plot depends on sidebets on the game. I was reminded of Douglas Adams’ Life the Universe and Everything where it is revealed that cricket is a faint race memory of the most destructive war in the history of the universe, the Krikkitt Wars, and the climax of the book is a game of cricket that could destroy the universe. In Summerland, the destruction of the universe is a sidebet on the final game. There is an incident that brings on the climax, but it’s contrived and unorganic, almost literally deux ex machina. The mythology is supposed to be centred on baseball but the baseball feels tacked on.
And despite Chabon’s lyrical description of the games, you need a fair bit of knowledge before you embark, of terminology, tactics and jargon. It is a mark of the cultural domination of the States that I know who Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Babe Ruth and many other famous baseball players are, despite never watching a game of baseball. But my ignorance of the game is profound. I had to look up ‘designated hitter’ in Wikipedia to understand one of Chabon’s jokes.
Neil Gaiman created an American mythology in American Gods, finding a spiritual equivalent of the history of the United States through old world and new world gods fighting it out in the American heartland. Gaiman too loves to fill his books with strands from many traditions of myth and legend but the end result is like one of those old picture puzzles, with faces and objects hidden among painstaking woodcuts of trees, mountains and skies. Chabon has given us a collage put together in haste.
- The book sold well in the States but I doubt it sold well anywhere else. I think if you believed in baseball like Chabon, and shared his knowledge of the game, you would find this book more enjoyable and more satisfying. Yet I loved both The Natural and Field of Dreams. Summerland, however, never gets beyond appealing to the baseball lover to find a wider audience.
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