15 March, 2002: The Iowa Baseball Confederacy
Most books that attempt to move the magic realism of writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I will define, very loosely, as novels set in the everyday world in which the fantastic happens and is not explained) to the United States are generally dismal failures. One which was not was Shoeless Joe, the book by W.P. Kinsella schmaltzed up for the movie Field of Dreams. Kinsella's The Iowa Baseball Confederacy doesn't quite live up to the earlier book, but the novel -- a rather confused tale of an 1908 exhibition game between the all-stars of a semi-pro league, the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and the Chicago Cubs -- still works. The game, held in Onamata, Iowa, lasted for days, and nobody seems to believe in it except Gideon Clarke, a young man whose father was imparted with the knowledge after being struck by lightening. There's much more crammed into the book than there needs to be (midgets! albinos! terrorists! great ghostly trickster Indians! carnies!), but I found it enjoyable nonetheless, perhaps because so much of what Kinsella is playing with involves cracked takes on things that I find particularly American. This is probably best left to those who enjoyed Shoeless Joe and are looking for something a bit more manic, however, as the parts really come off as better realized than the whole.