a.k.a. The Not-Really-About-Baseball Book With The Really Nice Cover That Lots Of People Seem To Adore, Even Those Who Don't Care About Baseball, Because Honest To God, This Book is Not Really Abut Baseball.
I have little active interest and even less understanding of baseball, but after this incredible first novel, Chad Harbach is welcome to write about whatever the hell he wants. Greyhound racing. Tuna canning. Stamp collecting.
Because, if it's anything like The Art of Fielding, he'll populate that tiny world with some of the most immediately likeable and well-defined characters you'll ever see on the page. People with whom you might have nothing obvious in common, who you'd probably walk past on the street without a second glance, each brought to life as unique bundles of hopes and fears and neuroses and knee pains and eccentricities and family histories and habits of speech.
Harbach has an insane, sometimes frustratingly enviable knack for characterisation. We spent time inside four different heads throughout the book, growing to know all of them intimately; perhaps even better than they know themselves. You'll want the very best for each for them, even when their best outcomes are mutually exclusive.
This makes all the more rewarding - perhaps even a little thrilling - to then step behind a different set of eyes, see the same people from the outside, and get them.
They don't just think and act like actual people, but interact like them too. Harbach's take on modern, everyday human friendship - and all the dialogue, gestures and linguistic shorthand that comes with it - is another one of his obvious strengths. Whether romantic or platonic, heterosexual or homosexual, familial or distant, there's a love between each pairing of them that feels uncannily real.
You guys, this is a really good book.
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