Weeks 13 & 14: W.P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe"

We're quickly nearing the end of the semester and have reached our final novel, W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe — a book that's decidedly different that much of what we've read before.  Aside from the fact that Kinsella is Canadian (offering up a novel perspective on the game from the point of view of that fated nation [Expos R.I.P.]), he's working in more of a populist literary tradition than some of the more high-minded authors we've read, and while their baseball stories and novels are outliers among their larger collected works, Kinsella has made his career writing about the game, with Shoeless Joe joined by The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa and Box Socials.

That doesn't mean that there aren't interesting things going on in the novel, however.  Shoeless Joe is Kinsella's debut and full of the sort of daring feats you'd expect from an author's first time out of the gate.  In much the same way that Word Smith is haunted by the question of the Great American Novel in the novel of the same name, and Harbach's The Art of Fielding is guided by its own titular book-within-a-book and Melville's Moby Dick, here it's noted literary recluse J.D. Salinger who's captivated Kinsellas's imagination, appearing as a major character in the book and providing the name for its protagonist, Ray Kinsella (a minor character appearing in both The Catcher in the Rye and one of Salinger's stories).  You might also recognize the plot from a little-known film that was made from it called Field of Dreams.

As probably the most popular of our novels, I'd imagine we all have very different editions of Shoeless Joe and the novel doesn't easily break down, so I'll leave it to you to read roughly a third of the book for each day.

• Fri. April 5: first third
• Tues. April 9: second third
• Fri. April 12: third third