Roth, Phillip. The Great American Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. 1973. Print
First Sentences:
Call me Smitty.
Description:
Honestly, Phillip Roth's The Great American Novel is definitely not for everyone. First, you must be a baseball enthusiast, well-versed in and delighted by the nuances, jargon, and insider goings-on of a major league team. Second, you have to enjoy black humor with its irony, biting wit, and uncomfortable situations. Third, a working knowledge of some classical literature and literary techniques (e.g., over-long sentences, revered writers, famous novels, etc) helps. It also would help if you can recognize a few mythological names and places since most of the novel's characters and locales use these names.
Right from the first sentence there is the tongue-in-cheek reference to the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael") and Roth takes off from there. The Prologue is a long rant by Wordsmith "Smitty" Smith, the aged sports reporter from a by-gone era, who is attending the sportswriters gathering at the Baseball Hall of Fame. To everyone else's mocking ridicule, Smitty plans to cast his vote for Luke Gafaloon, the great hitter from the Ruppert Mundys. Never heard of them? Well, that's because the Mundys were part of the Patriot League, the forgotten/suppressed third major league from the Depression and World War II eras.
When the other baseball writers claim never to have heard of Gafaloon or the Patriot League, Smitty decides to write the epic story of that era and the shenanigans that led to that League's demise. It will be the Great American Novel because Smitty disparages other claimants to that title, from Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and many others.
Smitty's Prologue might be a slog for anyone not fascinated by literature and black humor, so skip it if you get bored. Soon Smitty begins his history of the ill-fated Patriot League and its quirky players when the best players had been drafter into military service during World War II. There are stories of luminaries like Gil Gammesh, the fireballer who pitches a perfect game of all strikes ... until with two out in the ninth and two strikes on the final hitter when the umpire calls a ball on a close pitch. Fireworks ensue.
Here's a partial list of a few of the major characters Smitty follows on and off field:
Smitty's narration can be crude, demeaning to women (and also men), and definitely strongly-opinionated on baseball, its players, and administrators. For Smitty, baseball is a beautiful game, wonderfully played by the greats, yet the Patriot League is full of quirky impostors, greedy owners, blind umpires, and corrupt league officials. It is up to him to record an honest report to preserve the memory of this ill-fated league, the teams, and the characters that make up this era.
It is a colorful tale indeed, full of baseball games and behind-the-scenes plotting, of players you grown to love or hate, and a world of sports rarely portrayed so cleverly. For the right reader, The Great American Novel is an absorbing, fantastic, and very, very funny novel. I, of course, loved it!
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Call me Smitty.
That's what everybody else called me -- the ballplayers, the bankers, the bareback riders, the baritones, the bartenders, the bastards, the best-selling writers (excepting Hem who dubbed my Frederico), the bicyclists, the big-game hunters (Hem the exception again), the billiards champs, the bishops, the blacklisted (myself included), the black marketeers, the blonds, the bloodsuckers, the bluebloods, the bookies, the Bolsheviks (some of my best friends, Mr. Chairman - what of it?), the bombardiers, the bootblacks, the bootlicks, the bosses, the boxers, the Brahmins, the brass hats, the British (Sir Smitty as of '36), the broads, the broadcasters, the broncobusters, the brunettes, the black bucks down in Barbados (Mistah Smitty), the Buddhist monks in Burma, one Bulkington, the bullfighters, the bull throwers, the burlesque comics, the burlesque stars, the bushman, the bums, and the butlers. And that's only the letter B fans, only one of the big Twenty Six.
Description:
Honestly, Phillip Roth's The Great American Novel is definitely not for everyone. First, you must be a baseball enthusiast, well-versed in and delighted by the nuances, jargon, and insider goings-on of a major league team. Second, you have to enjoy black humor with its irony, biting wit, and uncomfortable situations. Third, a working knowledge of some classical literature and literary techniques (e.g., over-long sentences, revered writers, famous novels, etc) helps. It also would help if you can recognize a few mythological names and places since most of the novel's characters and locales use these names.
Right from the first sentence there is the tongue-in-cheek reference to the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael") and Roth takes off from there. The Prologue is a long rant by Wordsmith "Smitty" Smith, the aged sports reporter from a by-gone era, who is attending the sportswriters gathering at the Baseball Hall of Fame. To everyone else's mocking ridicule, Smitty plans to cast his vote for Luke Gafaloon, the great hitter from the Ruppert Mundys. Never heard of them? Well, that's because the Mundys were part of the Patriot League, the forgotten/suppressed third major league from the Depression and World War II eras.
When the other baseball writers claim never to have heard of Gafaloon or the Patriot League, Smitty decides to write the epic story of that era and the shenanigans that led to that League's demise. It will be the Great American Novel because Smitty disparages other claimants to that title, from Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and many others.
Smitty's Prologue might be a slog for anyone not fascinated by literature and black humor, so skip it if you get bored. Soon Smitty begins his history of the ill-fated Patriot League and its quirky players when the best players had been drafter into military service during World War II. There are stories of luminaries like Gil Gammesh, the fireballer who pitches a perfect game of all strikes ... until with two out in the ninth and two strikes on the final hitter when the umpire calls a ball on a close pitch. Fireworks ensue.
Here's a partial list of a few of the major characters Smitty follows on and off field:
- Roland Agni, the brilliant fielding, hard-hitting player whose father makes him play for free for the worst team in order to instill humility in Roland;
- Bob Yamm, uniform number 1/4, the pinch-hitting midget instructed never to swing his bat in order to draw a needed walk, but decides one infamous day to take a cut at the ball;
- Nickname Dumar, the young kid who longs for a big-league nickname but gets "Nickname" as his moniker instead;
- Luke Gofannon, the most prolific home run hitter in the majors, but who loves triples best;
- Hothead Ptah, the wooden-legged former legend now dubbed "the most irritating player in baseball";
- Isaac Ellis, the genius teenager who develops a secret formula to make the Mundys unbeatable;
- Angela Trust, the elderly owner of the Mundys who has torrid affairs with the best players;
- Ulysses S. Fairsmith, the Mundys' manager who brought baseball to the darkest regions of Africa;
- General Oakhart, President of the Patriot League, who gives away the Mundys' stadium to the US military for wartime training, forcing the Mundys to play all their home games on the road.
The Great American Novel documents these oddball characters as they play games, carouse, and do their best to win games with their limited talent. Then the unthinkable happens: the Mundys start winning. But there are Russians and international politics involved, plots laid and nefarious schemes undertaken. Soon the Mundys are disgraced and the Patriot League abolished from all baseball records.
Smitty's narration can be crude, demeaning to women (and also men), and definitely strongly-opinionated on baseball, its players, and administrators. For Smitty, baseball is a beautiful game, wonderfully played by the greats, yet the Patriot League is full of quirky impostors, greedy owners, blind umpires, and corrupt league officials. It is up to him to record an honest report to preserve the memory of this ill-fated league, the teams, and the characters that make up this era.
It is a colorful tale indeed, full of baseball games and behind-the-scenes plotting, of players you grown to love or hate, and a world of sports rarely portrayed so cleverly. For the right reader, The Great American Novel is an absorbing, fantastic, and very, very funny novel. I, of course, loved it!
Happy reading.
Fred
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