"My name is Gideon Clarke, and, like my father before me, I have on more than one occasion been physically ejected from the corporate offices of the Chicago Cubs Baseball Club, which are located at Wrigley Field, 1060 West Addison, in Chicago."
So begins The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), by the late W. P. Kinsella, whose prior novel, Shoeless Joe, became the film Field of Dreams. An elderly coworker recommended Shoeless Joe to me a couple of years before the film debuted, and I loved the book. But I thought The Iowa Baseball Confederacy was a much better book, and I stand by that.
It is the craziest baseball book I've ever read, more so than John Alexander Graham's Babe Ruth Caught in a Snowstorm, and at least as crazy as Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., but a lot more thrilling. Like Coover, or Fred fave Ray Bradbury, Kinsella was a prose stylist with a vivid imagination for magical realism. So what's this book about?
In one way it's about the magic of Iowa, the setting for this book as well as Shoeless Joe and Kinsella's penultimate novel, Magic Time. Kinsella was actually from Canada, but he must have sensed something in the air in that land of cornfields and weird caucuses.
Our hero, an albino-looking fellow named Gideon Clarke, has a mission, and that mission is his dead father's, which is to prove that the titular Iowa Baseball Confederacy once fielded a team against a barnstorming Chicago Cubs in the town of Big Inning, a game that lasted for thousands of innings, day after day for weeks, because the home team always tied the score in the bottom of the inning but couldn't go ahead. But that's hardly all that's going on:
About a baseball game going on for a month or more. And in a rainstorm, too. And there was something about lightning. Oh, and a big Indian, and a dead midget, and an albino. The river flooded and carried away the town while the game continued right on, as nice as you please, and the sun sucked ballplayers right up into the sky.After Gideon's father, Matthew, was struck by lightning in 1943, an event that Gideon says "tampered with my father's blood, rearranged his chromosomes gently as a baby's breath turns a mobile," he was gifted with the thorough knowledge of the league and the events of 1908:
In Matthew Clarke's brain, which that morning felt bright as chrome, full of white light and blinding metal, the complete history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was burned in, deep as a brand, vivid, resplendent, dazzling in its every detail.But the memory of this incredible game, which featured Cubs stars like pitcher Three Finger Brown and the still-famous double-play combo of Tinker and Evers and Chance, has been wiped from humanity. When his father wrote to various men whom he knew had been involved in the Iowan league, they claim to have no knowledge of any game or of the league itself. And of course, the Cubs threw Matthew out of their office multiple times.
Now the burden of this knowledge is on Gideon's shoulders. How did this game happen? Why did it go on so long, supposedly into the Cubs' World Series-winning season? Did all those wild things really occur (and there were many bloody and astounding events in the game)? Who won? And why was this singular event completely forgotten?
Ultimately there is only one way to find out what really happened during that game -- Gideon must go through a crack in time, back to 1908, and see it for himself.
That's just the first part of the book. To find the answers, we readers must follow Gideon and see the game. And I am honor-bound to give away no more.
Sports novels are tough to write, and they usually don't sell. Why? Well, men who like sports generally don't like novels, but that's hardly the real issue, I think. The thing is, the drama of sports comes from not knowing what's going to happen on the field. But when a novelist is writing, he has to know. So you can't escape the contrivance. The reader knows that someone is in charge of events -- the author -- and he is pulling the strings. It's what I disliked about Roger Kahn's novel The Seventh Game; you could see the strings. Strangely, this is not true with sports movies, perhaps because the live image of people playing the game gives us the illusion that we are watching real, unpredictable events. The funny thing is, unless based on real events, works of fiction always have the author making the decisions in the back, but the relative simplicity of sports, with rules and mutual goals, makes the director of the plot more visible.
The best baseball novels, as Kinsella knew, are not just about baseball. That's why The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Shoeless Joe, Eric Rolfe Greenberg's The Celebrant, Mark Harris's Bang the Drum Slowly, Bernard Malmud's The Natural, Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, David Carkeet's The Greatest Slump of All Time, Darryl Brock's If I Never Get Back, Douglass Wallop's The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, Mark Friedman's Columbus Slaughters Braves, and maybe even Five-Yard Fuller of the N.Y. Gnats were all so successful, artistically if not all financially. Because while baseball provides a motive force and dramatic drive, these stories, like the best novels, are really about everything else as well. And, incidentally, It's what I intended to do in my humorous book MacFinster II: MacFinster's Folly.
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And speaking of that book, and of awesome novels, don't forget! This week, through the end of Friday, all my novels are TOTALLY FREE! Well, for the Kindle or Kindle software, anyway. The paperbacks'll cost ya. All this as we gear up for a YUGE announcement next week. Can you stand it? Yeah, probably.
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