October 28, 2021
BECAUSE IT'S THE BEST SPORT:
Why is Baseball the Most Literary of Sports?: Lincoln Michel Goes Deep Into the Prose of America's Pastime (Lincoln Michel, October 28, 2021, LitHub)
Malamud's friend (and sometimes rival), Philip Roth wrote his own baseball novel two decades later with 1973's satirical The Great American Novel.The great postmodernist trickster Robert Coover wrote his baseball novel in the early innings of his career. His second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), followed an accountant who escapes from his dreary life into a dice-simulated baseball game.
Ironically, while Roth's entry is pretty awful, Coover's is a--not the--great American novel, as it replays Creation. And the fatal weakness of the text, likewise, duplicates Creation as he loses control of the narrative, just as Waugh loses control of his game.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 28, 2021 8:06 AM