For our second baseball novel of the semester, we're only jumping ahead sixteen years (from 1952 to 1968), however in terms of tone and style, these books are as wildly different from one another as the eras in which they were produced. While Bernard Malamud's The Natural is a product of stoic postwar philosophy and a logical extension of the modernist prose style, Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association... revels in the burgeoning aesthetic movement that would come to be known as postmodernism. You can already tell that by looking at their names alone, though as we'll see, for all their differences, the central conceit of baseball will provide both authors with a surprising amount of common ground.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. — there, I've said its full name once and now we can abbreviate at will! —is Robert Coover's second novel, following his 1966 début, The Origin of the Brunists and written concurrently with many of the daring, genre-defining short stories that would be published the following year in the collection Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions (you've already read one story from this volume, "McDuff on the Mound;" perhaps his most [in]famous story, "The Babysitter," is also found there). For all of the stylistic play at work in the novel, it's is nonetheless a story of great character-centered emotion, particularly focused on the novel's titular hero and protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, a lonesome accountant by day who spends his evenings obsessively playing a tabletop baseball game of his own invention. While such a lifestyle doesn't seem ripe for drama, you'd be surprised just how much can happen in only a short time.
While the UBA was appreciated in its own time, it's particularly interesting to read the novel through the modern frame of SABRmetrics, whose practitioners' actuarial attention to detail would put someone like Henry to shame (chalk it up to the difference between his era and our computer-dominated data landscape, perhaps?). Nonetheless, much like The Natural, there's a sort of mythological overtone here — note that Henry's initials are close to JHWH, a Hebrew abbreviation for Yahweh in the Bible — and are our observations of a potential God complex in Henry (or the questions raised in our discussion of The Natural about whether one can control reality, change fate, etc.) so far off the mark when SABRmetrician Nate Silver can predict the outcomes of the past two presidential elections with startling accuracy simply by massaging the numbers?
We'll divide our time with the UBA into three segments as follows:
- Tues. February 5: chapters 1-3
- Fri. February 8: chapters 4 & 5
- Tues. February 12: chapters 6-8
And here are some supplemental links that might be of interest to you:
- the original New York Times review of the novel
- a 2010 reappraisal of the book in the Times
- Coover isn't the only American novelist to envision a tabletop baseball game. Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac created his own game, which used cards instead of dice. Read more about it in a Times article here, and don't miss the slideshow of images from the game here.
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