22 February, 2002: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor is the first novel by Robert Coover that I've read. I've seen him speak any number of times, and I've read Pricksongs and Descants, his first collection of stories, so I was prepared for something interesting intellectually, formally experimental, emotionally arid, And probably sexist, too. I was only right on the first and last counts. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. is about a mild-mannered Walter Mitty of an accountant and his slow alienation from human contact in favor of a dice-based baseball game of his own devising. He has created a whole fictional league of 1920s-ish baseball, with multiple generations of players, a Hall of Fame, and a private mythology. He is, in effect, God, and it's unhinging him. As one magical, horrible season gets underway, he abandons his job, his only contacts with the outside world, and everything else, in favor of rolling the dice and seeing how the games come out. It's the kind of great idea I'd expect from Coover, but I'm surprised how compelling he made Waugh, if not the imaginary baseball players. And nobody will mistake this book for something by Tom Clancy, but there was very little of the back and forth jumps designed to disorient the reader and decenter the story that I encoutered in Pricksongs. I don't think of Coover, whose major association in my mind is the utterly uninvolving "The Babysitter", as the sort of writer who would take a man struggling with a life of quiet desperation as his subject matter, but there you have it. It makes me want to go look for The Public Burning, in which Coover takes on Nixon (a man struggling with desperation of a decidely less quiet nature.)