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The Great God Baseball:
Religion in Modern Baseball Fiction
by Allen E. Hye
Mercer University Press, 2004. 192 pages
My “reading plan” is both erratic and eclectic, but when winter turns to spring and baseball once again demonstrates its irresistibility, I find myself turning to the literature of the game: the great nonfiction of the Rogers, Angell and Kahn; the poetry, humor, and passion that mark every issue of the Elysian Fields Quarterly; the diverse novels that interweave baseball with the fabric of lives both ordinary and extraordinary. This spring I enjoyed the discovery of Paul Dickson’s The Hidden Language of Baseball, a history of the use of signs among players and coaches. I caught up with a couple of issues of Elysian Fields. Then I revisited decades of baseball fiction by way of The Great God Baseball, Allen E. Hye’s study of the element of religion in modern baseball fiction.
Hye, a professor of German and Danish at Wright State University who has taught an honors course on baseball (presumably in English), has taken it upon himself to “proclaim the word of a body of outstanding, underappreciated fiction.” Hye finds religion to be a prominent theme, and notes that “just as baseball fiction in not juvenile but adult, so its religious themes are not elementary Sunday school lessons but rich slices of the human -- and specifically American -- experience.”
I can easily understand Hye’s passion for this literature. The sense of wonder and transcendence that accompanied my first reading, more than twenty years ago, of W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See, remains a vivid memory and returns every time I revisit even just a few pages of either of those novels. Those are two of the nine (as in innings) novels that Hye explores in his study (see sidebar).
Hye opts to exclude Bernard Malamud’s The Natural from his main “lineup” because “Only the broadest interpretation of ‘religious’ would include the novel’s allusions to classical mythology and the legends of medieval Christian society, and such a potentially forced reading would, I fear, strain the fabric of the chapter.” Still, he opens the book with a brief overview of Malumud’s novel because “it uses the game as a framework of a dynamic story with layers of mythic allusions.” Hye’s choice regarding The Natural is a wise one; the novel doesn’t quite fit with the remainder of the study, but that makes it no less of a benchmark for a study of novels that “are in some way indebted to its pioneering role in the history of baseball fiction.”
Avid readers of baseball fiction will no doubt find a some of their favorites among the novels studied here, and will also discover some hard-to-find gems. Hye begins with Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which, while “not an overtly ‘religious’ novel” contains “a plethora of biblical allusions” along with Faustian and Arthurian elements. He eventually reaches W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, which was, for Hye and for many other enthusiasts of the genre, the “gateway to adult baseball fiction.” (Indeed, the title of this study comes from the mouth of Ray Kinsella, the narrator of Shoeless Joe.) Hye marvels at Kinsella’s ability to create “literary magic” despite his personal rejection of “any notion of transcendence.” Such is the power of baseball on the literary imagination.
Nancy Willard, who is unlikely to reject the notion of transcendence, is the only woman writer considered here, and Hye’s enthusiasm for her work is almost equal to that which he demonstrates for Kinsella’s. He recognizes Things Invisible to See as a spiritual gift from its start (“In Paradise, on the banks of the River of Time, the Lord of the Universe is playing ball with His archangels”) by exclaiming, “What an opening sentence!” Willard’s gift for magical realism, abundantly evident in her writings for young people, reaches what is arguably its apex in this novel, and Hye clearly unfolds the novel’s strengths as a “sumptuous tale of life and death, entwined by the mysterious spiritual offshoots of heaven that make their way into space-time.”
David James Duncan’s The Brothers K gives Hye a chance to examine yet another form of baseball fiction. Duncan relies not on the magic realism of Kinsella and Willard and others, but on the stark realism of an American family in the turbulent 1950s, 60s, and 70s. “Stark” does not, however, describe the experience of reading (and re-reading) Duncan’s great work, which is high in nuance, energy, and compelling characters for whom baseball is but one of many touchstones (along with Seventh Day Adventism, the Vietnam War, and cancer). One might fault Hye for spending a bit too much time on the structure of the novel, but he does manage to grasp its heart nevertheless.
With this book, Allen Hye has done a service to readers of serious baseball fiction by attempting to put this genre on the critical map. Those of us who avidly read these books in seeming isolation can now feel a little less alone knowing that Hye and others are out there taking this work as seriously and joyfully as we do. But The Great God Baseball merely begins a discussion that we can hope will invite more participation, and inspire great new fiction, in years to come.
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