The Natural

"This was a tough choice because I decided to pick a couple of lesser known books first. So when it came to choosing which one of the real baseball classics to go for, it was between The Natural and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel . Roth and Malamud share concerns about Jewishness, and American-ness as well. I think The Natural wins, simply because Roth’s is an exuberant book and in some ways an essay about literature. If anyone has read The Art of Fielding [by Chad Harbach], that draws very heavily on Roth. Malamud’s book is a perfect, mythic take on baseball in which he plays with the myth of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail. His character, Roy Hobbs, is a Percival or Lancelot and he succumbs to corruption. The movie tacks on a happy ending which isn’t there in the book, which kills what is a pretty good movie. Robert Redford really is too old for the role, although he plays it rather well. The book ends exactly the way you expect those myths to end – he is brought down by his own hubris. It came out in 1952, and a couple of years later a novel called The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant was published, which became the musical The Damn Yankees . I think that was inspired by Malamud, because it retells the Faust story as a baseball story. But Malamud’s novel is much richer and deeper. What is also interesting is that Malamud was born in Brooklyn, just like Roth, but was of immigrant parents. To people in that generation, baseball was a major means of assimilation into American culture. You find that in all kinds of writing about the immigrant experience. The way to become American was to learn baseball. As I said at the beginning, I think baseball reflects an American ideal which is now an American fantasy. Football reflects what America really is. Mechanised, militaristic, violent, obsessive, not pastoral and not relaxed. This has been exacerbated by television and media. Don DeLillo wrote a novella called Pafko at the Wall , about the famous 1951 playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The story reappeared as the opening segment of his novel Underworld . As a novel itself it would be a great analysis of what baseball means to America. But he also wrote a novel called End Zone , which in effect says that the reason we are in the Vietnam War is because we love American football. And, oddly enough, Robert Coover wrote a novel about Richard Nixon called Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? , about Nixon’s failures as a football player and with his sex life. He was a scrub in college but never quit. He would drive Pat Nixon to dates with other men when he was first trying to date her. It began taking over from baseball with the Kennedys , who were big touch-football players. Then with the advent of television, it was discovered that American football fits the television screen better than any other sport. Definitely. That is because, although there are some very good novels about football and boxing and some other sports, they tend to be more about the sport itself. They use the sport to show the characters of the people in them. But even non-fiction about baseball has more depth. The best baseball novels tend to be about something bigger than the sport. They use baseball as a metaphor for life."