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A review by frasersimons
For Love of the Game by Michael Shaara
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
I’ve read this book, more or less, every year for around 25 years now. No other book has that effect on me. I don’t even like sports all that much. What really gets me about it is the idea of a man who knows he’s a boy, not yet fully grown, clinging to a throughline of love. So long as that love is true there is no real other, or so he thinks. Billy Chapel is a born to be, tried and true, 37 year old baseball pitcher. Part of the vanguard—the old guard. He has pitched his entire life, and is an antiquated relic of a past way of both playing, and the game itself. Which has morphed into a for profit-less spirit, money changer. Few players play.
But Billy isn’t that way. Only, he’s also at a crossroads. At the last game of a terrible season, his team goes to play a team that stands a chance, with a win, to go to the series. He’s old enough that he can’t pitch all game; but he’s got hit skill and his wits, and not much of him has faltered with age. He learns he’s to be traded only after a woman, Carol, a ship that passes in the night when he is lucky, for more than ten years, stands him up, and might stand to leave. During the course of the ball game we see Billy enter his internal mechanism, as the curated house of cards he’s maintained falls apart. But because it is falling apart while he is playing the game, and can enter himself in a way usually inaccessible—he may yet stand a chance of negotiating these trials, and, possibly, growing up.
Even the prose work and dialogue feel like Chapel is antiquated. But he also manages a forthright earnestness forged in those past times. There is a depth to his boyishness and the idea of the game being something like Neverland, and he Peter Pan. So long as the game continues as it should he is invincible, but also cursed. And the perspective is unique, offering stream-of-consciousness paired with 3rd person. The verisimilitude gives everyone a nonfiction quality, like it hasn’t been coached in editing dialogue. They’re clumsy and messy and pause often; reiterate and obfuscate. The unique qualities reinforce the themes and especially annunciate a fantastic, earned end.
It never ceases to work on me. It’s a book that ages with me like no other. Most I don’t even care to see them try. If I ever want to be really moved I only need to pick one of my three copies of the book. Because when I travelled for work I would seek it out in used book stores just for fun, but also because, and I didn’t know this then, I needed this kind of comfort I’ve yet to find elsewhere, in a confluence of boyhood, sports, love, brokenness, and purity. Somehow unsullied.
But Billy isn’t that way. Only, he’s also at a crossroads. At the last game of a terrible season, his team goes to play a team that stands a chance, with a win, to go to the series. He’s old enough that he can’t pitch all game; but he’s got hit skill and his wits, and not much of him has faltered with age. He learns he’s to be traded only after a woman, Carol, a ship that passes in the night when he is lucky, for more than ten years, stands him up, and might stand to leave. During the course of the ball game we see Billy enter his internal mechanism, as the curated house of cards he’s maintained falls apart. But because it is falling apart while he is playing the game, and can enter himself in a way usually inaccessible—he may yet stand a chance of negotiating these trials, and, possibly, growing up.
Even the prose work and dialogue feel like Chapel is antiquated. But he also manages a forthright earnestness forged in those past times. There is a depth to his boyishness and the idea of the game being something like Neverland, and he Peter Pan. So long as the game continues as it should he is invincible, but also cursed. And the perspective is unique, offering stream-of-consciousness paired with 3rd person. The verisimilitude gives everyone a nonfiction quality, like it hasn’t been coached in editing dialogue. They’re clumsy and messy and pause often; reiterate and obfuscate. The unique qualities reinforce the themes and especially annunciate a fantastic, earned end.
It never ceases to work on me. It’s a book that ages with me like no other. Most I don’t even care to see them try. If I ever want to be really moved I only need to pick one of my three copies of the book. Because when I travelled for work I would seek it out in used book stores just for fun, but also because, and I didn’t know this then, I needed this kind of comfort I’ve yet to find elsewhere, in a confluence of boyhood, sports, love, brokenness, and purity. Somehow unsullied.