Ragtag Rejects, Not Rogues

OK this is clever. Rather than having a single person go on a quest for the impossible, Philip Roth writes of an entire baseball team in pursuit of a winning season. Get a sense this isn't 100% picaresque yet? It is close, I'll admit that. The players on the team, the manager, nay, even the owner seem naive. Because it is the summer of 1943 and their home field has been redeployed as a point of departure for soldiers heading off to WWII, the Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey consist of the best left uncalled to service: a dwarf, a catcher with one leg, a right fielder with one arm, a teenager and an assortment of retirees. Yes, the characters are bizarre and the quest to finish above the cellar insurmountable. In addition to the traditional sports fetishes and charms, Roth has the team's success dependent on a new formula of Wheaties (here are the elements of bizarre and naive).

However, it is all so visibly contrived. Roth assumes the persona of the narrator, Word Smith, a sports writer who writes a 45 page prologue that is nothing but an apologia. Again in the epilogue, he plays the martyred author whose novel is rejected untold times as unpublishable (an accurate insight or false bravado). There are plenty of literary references that in the hands of TC Boyle would have been a seamless marvel but here come across as blatant bragging, like the teenage Jewish "genius" son of the owner of an opposing team.

The writing style is a combination of the compulsion of baseball statistics and hack alliteration. The characters are presented in a string of vignettes, that only goes to reinforce the Ruppert Mundys lack of cohesion. Since the only other Roth I ever read was Portnoy's Complaint (and vowed after that never to read another), this book was better than that first exposure but The Great American Novel it ain't.