There Used to Be a Ballpark

The Closer: A Baseball Love Story by Alan Mindell (Sunberry Press, $14.95, 188 pages)

Alan Mindell’s debut novel mostly satisfies.

Knuckleballer Terry Landers makes his improbable major league debut in his 30’s after toiling in the minors for 15 seasons when Oakland manager Rick Gonzalez arranges for a trade. Landers was on the verge of being released by the Phillies organization, but with the proper tender loving care from Gonzalez, he takes over the closer role and becomes an integral part of an unlikely playoff run.

Muscular superstar left fielder Elston Murdoch, in his contract year leading to free agency, perseveres through the personal turmoil of a drug-addled daughter to miraculously fall one game short of tying Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak.

Terry and Murdoch, as they are called throughout the novel, form a bond and support each other through Murdoch’s improbable search for his daughter and Terry’s burgeoning romance with single mom, Lauren.

Though told in third person, the book reads as if it is told through Terry. In a line near the end of the story Terry thinks, “Five months. Is that all the time that has passed? It seems more like five years.” That line came shortly after I was thinking to myself, “Man, a lot has happened in three months.”

Five months span 184 pages, and there are some spots where things feel a little rushed. Though there are times that more character or plot development is warranted, Mindell is best when he gets inside the head of Terry, who – like all players at one point or another – is at the crossroads of the end of his career and the rest of his life.

A few unusual events test the reader’s patience. For example, baseball managers don’t really run through the streets of impoverished urban areas to monitor the movements of their star players.

The Closer is one of those hokey baseball books with a happy ending, and as we baseball fans are desperately holding on to the end of one more long but all-too-short season, there are a lot worse ways to pass the time.

Well recommended.

Dave Moyer

A review copy was provided by the author.

Dave Moyer is an education administrator and the author of Life and Life Only: A Novel.

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A Quiet Emotional Work

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff (Knopf, $25.95, 249 pages; Vintage, $15.95, 272 pages)

 

In his novel The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s character Holden Caulfield uses the phrase, “quiet emotional” in place of the more typical “quite emotional.” This is a quiet emotional memoir about how Salinger helped a young woman, Joanna Rakoff, find her role, her place, her calling in life – which was to become a writer.

“Have you read Salinger?” Rakoff asks the reader. “Very likely you have. Can you recall the moment you encountered Holden Caulfield for the first time? The sharp intake of breath as you realized this was a novel, a voice, a character, a way of telling a story, a view of the world unlike any you’d previously encountered. I loved Holden, in his grief-fueled rage.”

My Salinger Year is a comfortable, entertaining and engaging story that does not have pretensions of being cinematic. However, Rakoff writes quite well, as in this selection, about the difference between Marc, a friend who is getting married, and Don, Rakoff’s then-boyfriend (and a sad choice of one):

“You ready for the big day?” Don asked Marc, patting him on the back. He was trying for cheer, for bonhomie, which gave him the aspect of an actor in a community theater production…

“I don’t know,” said Marc, with an enormous smile. When he smiled, he seemed to radiate pure waves of goodwill and genuine happiness. This was, I supposed, the difference between Marc and Don: Marc was fully at home in the world, content with life. He needed, he wanted, nothing more than what he had. Don wanted everything, everyone; Don wanted and wanted.

Although this true tale is about Rakoff’s work at a literary agency at the start of her professional career, it’s also a story about what happens when she leaves behind her “right guy” in Berkeley, and takes up with Don in Manhattan. Don is so clearly and absolutely wrong for her. The reader will feel some frustration while reading about her out-of-phase life with Don, a person who refused, without explanation, to take her to his best friend’s wedding.

The writer is now happily married to the “right” person, but she’s quite forthcoming about the fact that she made a key mistake in the game of love as a young woman. Fortunately, she was able to escape into the writings of J. D. Salinger, as she did on the weekend of the wedding that she was blocked from attending.

“All through that weekend, even as I ripped through his entire oeuvre, I kept having to put the books down and breathe. He shows us his characters at their most bald, bares their most private thoughts, most telling actions. It’s almost too much. Almost.”

Rakoff only met Salinger once but spoke to him often on the telephone. He convinced her to do what she needed to do for herself – for her own happiness. His advice convinced her to leave the safety and security of the agency job after just 12 months. It was a job that would get her no closer to writing than reading manuscripts.

Near the end of My Salinger Year, Rakoff learns of Salinger’s death and reacts to it in a touching way. Salinger was, and will remain, her rescuer, her larger-than-life hero.

Salinger was an artist who touched many people through his work. He continues to reach and touch them to this day, as when high school students experience The Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey for the first time. It was his work and its effect on others that exhausted him and caused him to seek comfort in isolation: “For years, he’d tried to respond to his fans. But the emotional toll grew too great.”

While Salinger may have remained as distant as Joe DiMaggio on his later years, there’s no denying the fact that he left behind his bold, major impact on the world of literature.

“Salinger was not cutesy. His work was not nostalgic. There were no fairy tales about child geniuses traipsing the streets of Old New York.”

“Salinger was nothing like I’d thought. Nothing.”

“Salinger was brutal. Brutal and funny and precise. I loved him. I loved it all.”

You may love this book.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

This review initially appeared on the Blogcritics website:

http://blogcritics.org/book-review-salinger-year-joanna-rakoff/

This review was also used by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Book-Review-My-Salinger-Year-by-Joanna-Rakoff-5676983.php