Book Review: The Natural

The Natural, by Bernard Malamud

    In the long, long ago, an old college friend handed me a copy of this book, telling me I should read it because it is the best baseball book ever written.

    I put the book aside, somehow ignoring it for the next four decades. But earlier this year, while meandering around a used-book store, I landed across the book. Not knowing where my original copy was, I decided to pick it up and actually read it this time.

    It was good.

    But the best baseball book ever written? I think not. I'd have to list at least five or six novels by W.P. Kinsella ahead of it. And perhaps a few others. 

    Maybe time has caught up with The Natural. It was, after all, published in 1952. It was made into a movie, with a then-middle-aged Robert Redford in the lead role, way back in 1984 -- long after an even younger Redford helped break the Watergate scandal.

Malamud is considered one of the greatest Jewish authors

of the 20th Century. Later in his writing career, he won a

Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer, his novel about anti-semitism in

the Russian Empire. The Natural is the first novel he published.

      The Natural begins with a young rube by the name of Roy Hobbs headed on a train to Chicago for a tryout with the Cubs. Something happens, and Hobbs' career stalls. Some 16 years later, Hobbs is signed as the new left fielder for the down-and-out New York Knights. Hobbs brings along his special bat, which he has named Wonderboy. He refuses to hit with anything else.

    It's unclear whether the bat has magical powers, or Hobbs just thinks it does. And while fueding with his veteran, old-school manager, Pop Fisher, Hobbs beomes the star of the team and starts leading the sad-sack Knights toward the pennant. As Hobbs gains fame and fortune, a cloud begins to surround him, and a deep, dark secret in his past is hinted.

    Each chapter of the book reads like a short story, self-contained but presenting a snippet of the whole. It's well written, and the baseball stories and tales in the dugout and clubhouse seem realistic for the era. But it sometimes falls into common baseball tropes -- the aging manager who's seen it all, the obnoxious superstar, the long-suffering fans. I also question some of the math -- in one sequence, a team is four games behind another in the pennant race, wins a four-game series, but then is just one game behind.

    But it's the magical sequences that are most problematic. Are they dreams? Mystical happenings? Or simply extended metaphors? 

    I don't know. And I am afraid the book's failure to properly deal with those is its major flaw.