I'm always wary when a book comes with a lot of praise (in case I haven't said that before), but I also can't help but be intrigued. In this case, the praise wasn't totally unearned, though it was not quite as great as it could have been. "The Art of Fielding" had clear strengths and weaknesses which fell across clearly identifiable lines.
The novel, as a whole, is centered around college baseball player Henry Skrimshander, who has an uncanny ability to field the ball (thus giving relevance to the title). Although Skrimshander is the central character, he only represents a fraction of the novel's plot. The rest of the book examines the lives of other characters who are all connected through how they know Henry. And that's where the novel falls apart.
The portions about Skrimshander are the most fascinating in the book, and could have (probably) stood on their own as a smaller novel. He is, by far, the most interesting character in the book, and I spent a lot of the time away from him wondering when he was going to reappear. ("When are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?") Unfortunately, there are so many other major characters that there are massive swaths of text in which Henry is totally absent.
Harbach's prose is especially successful when describing the baseball games, and for this I applaud him. There are very few books about baseball which accurately describe the game. Harbach manages to infuse those scenes with the grace and elegance that baseball deserves, without dropping any of the intensity of the game's competition.
There's an old piece of writing advice: "Write what you know." It felt like, at times, Harbach decided that he really knew about "the small-college experience" and just ran with that concept. But this strategy can be problematic because at points the novel seemed to be a one-trick pony.
"The Art of Fielding" was pretty good, though it wasn't great. That's what I'll end with.
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