My father always cites "The Southpaw" as one of his favorite books, so when I happened to see it in the library the other day, I just plucked it off the shelf. It’s a book about baseball, but also a book about a young man learning just how big and complicated the world is. You may know the movie “Bang the Drum Slowly,” which is an offshoot of this series of novels.
Just today I noticed an uptick of people on Facebook making references to spring training; somebody noting that it’s 48 days until pitchers and catchers, another someone wondering if we could just shoot straight from New Year’s Eve to Spring Training. The winter hasn’t even really begun yet, not a flake yet in New York, and people are already getting cagey. Long ways to go still, and it’ll get worse before it gets better.
Just today I noticed an uptick of people on Facebook making references to spring training; somebody noting that it’s 48 days until pitchers and catchers, another someone wondering if we could just shoot straight from New Year’s Eve to Spring Training. The winter hasn’t even really begun yet, not a flake yet in New York, and people are already getting cagey. Long ways to go still, and it’ll get worse before it gets better.
I likewise have been hot-stoving a little earlier than usual, feeding a little burgeoning interest in 19th-century baseball. I have a story idea I’m trying to flush out that involves the 1876 Cincinnati Reds and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It sounds weirder than it really is. Well, maybe not. I think I grabbed "The Southpaw" in part just to read a novel with baseball in it, to see what works and what doesn't.
The story of Henry Wiggen is a story often told; the young man leaving home to make his fame and fortune, and inevitably to learn what kind of person he is on the inside. It might make for an interesting companion piece to “The Catcher in the Rye” — even the titles kind of mesh — although the differences between Holden Caufield and Henry Wiggen are many and varied. But basically they’re two young New Yorkers in the late '40s/early '50s on the road to self-discovery, both outsiders although with vastly different levels of self-confidence and self-awareness. In short, Holden has to learn that not everybody is full of shit while Henry has to learn to many people are. I had a teacher in high school who often talked about developing an English course called “From Huck to Holden” that would focus on the rebellious young man in literature. “The Southpaw” could have been in that syllabus, with Henry, more a free spirit than a rebel, taking his place alongside Huck and Holden.
The funny thing is that not too long ago I wrote a blog post for The 6th Floor about the predominance of left-handers among the Muppets. I wish I had read “The Southpaw” before then, because the nature of lefties is a running theme in the book, and there certainly are a few moments where Henry embraces his left-handedness as a spiritual mark of some sort. It would have made a nice little reference.
If you’ve read “The Southpaw,” or any of Mark Harris’s books, I’d love hear your opinion. Or feel free to recommend something else in the comments below.
RSS Feed