Chad Harbach’s hefty first novel is one of the major stories of this year’s literary scene: nine years in the making, sold for the kind of sum usually reserved for celebrities, and trailing laudatory quotes from luminaries such as Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney. It is then, something of a surprise to discover how dull and uninspiring the book is. If this is the latest contender for Great American Novel, it is only so for the Hallmark channel version of America, all soft-edges and trite, predictable sentimentality.
Set mostly at the fictional Westish College, the novel centres on Henry Skrimshander, a preternaturally talented baseball shortstop whose surname is the first of the novel’s tiresome string of Melville puns. Spotted by the college’s baseball captain, Mike Schwartz, Henry wins a scholarship and proceeds to propel Westish’s baseball team to sporting greatness. But then, disaster strikes: he accidentally hurls the ball at his roommate, Owen, and ever after suffers the yips whenever he has to throw under pressure. Will the team make it to the national finals without him? Will he ever be able to throw a baseball again? Tied in with this semblance of a plot line is the return of the college president’s wayward daughter, Pella, who promptly falls for Schwartz, and a turgid and cringeworthy affair between Owen and the college president, Affenlight, who never knew he was gay until he saw this Adonis. Still awake?
Perhaps in more assured hands something could have been rescued from this shipwreck of lazy plotting, but Harbach fails to do so. I think part of this failure stems from an overwhelming reluctance to give any of his characters a flaw. Put simply, whenever anything bad happens to a character, it isn’t their fault. Henry’s great torment is occasioned by bad luck. Affenlight isn’t a college president abusing his duty of care in a very creepy manner, he’s just struck down by Eros. Schwartz and Pella fall out with each other, but it’s all a misunderstanding. Et cetera. This curse of niceness/blandness afflicts everyone in the college, right down to the grumpy canteen chef, who secretly wants to train people to cook amazing food.
However, despite their varied stories and crises, all this cast of modern-day saints achieve is a steady leeching of all tension from the novel: a critical fault in any novel, but especially one so long. The reader is left in no doubt that everything will end in a happy fashion, and so it proves. Even when Affenlight’s affair is discovered, he is granted a graceful exit, then honoured in one of the book’s most ludicrous scenes.
And throughout all 512 pages of this, there are the constant references to Melville, in everything from Henry’s surname to Affenlight’s email password. It’s hard to see what these serve. Presumably, they’re intended as a knowing nod to the tradition of the American novel. Yet the impression they leave is of an author piggybacking on Melville in an attempt to give this needlessly baggy book intellectual depth. Like virtually everything else in and about this book, they’re a failure.