Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Plume (1971), Paperback
Description
As owner of every team in the league, Henry is flush with pride in a young rookie who is pitching a perfect game. When the pitcher completes the miracle game, Henry's life lights up. But then the rookie is killed by a freak accident, and this'death' affects Henry's life in ways unimaginable. In a blackly comic novel that takes the reader between the real world and fantasy, Robert Coover delves into the notions of chance and power.
User reviews
LibraryThing member elenchus
Chapter I hits the perfect pitch of fan excitement, play-by-play energy of a radio announcer calling a thrilling matchup to a desperate audience, and lightning-flash glimpses inside the heads of players at key points in the drama. I've not read a better account of a baseball game, whether in
Chapter VIII transforms this account into another language entirely, everything pivots from sports journalism to heady moral philosophy, even as it all stays, intact, though prismed from one experience to another. It is psychological, religio-metaphysical, existential. It casts in a harsh light the metafiction played out in the preceding seven chapters, and winds up almost an opening chapter to another, dystopian novel.
In between, Coover offers up a character study of a solitary but not necessarily lonely accountant at a turning point in his life. Whether Henry Waugh suffers a mid-life crisis or gains a renewed commitment to an authentic self, is a question left to the reader. Coover's prose is neat but never simpleminded; serious but lit up with a rake's wicked humour; and ultimately teasing in the way Waugh himself is tantalizingly there, and yet, what is imagined and what lies there on the page is not in the end so obvious.
Coover also traffics in extended puns; lyrics to imagined baseball ballads sounding as genuine and aged as crusty sea shanties; and a lively & true sense of dialogue.
And then, there is the UBA itself: doled out over the course of the novel, the rules and statistics, odds and principles predicated on baseball's unmatched statistical archive. Coover must have kept records as close and accurate as did Waugh in order to describe what little of the UBA he did. It is eerily similar to a game invented by Jack Kerouac as a teen and played through his adult life, including parallels in the number of teams in the league (8), fictional players and backgrounds, extensive context such as financial transactions and trades between fictional owners ... even the fact both Kerouac and Waugh played a fictional horseracing game on the side. (See the NYTimes article linked by the Wikipedia entry for Fantasy Baseball.)
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fiction or creative non-fiction, Coover captures the dynamics & personality of a live contest and wonderfully sets the stage for so much more than baseball, all in a breathless 29 pages.Chapter VIII transforms this account into another language entirely, everything pivots from sports journalism to heady moral philosophy, even as it all stays, intact, though prismed from one experience to another. It is psychological, religio-metaphysical, existential. It casts in a harsh light the metafiction played out in the preceding seven chapters, and winds up almost an opening chapter to another, dystopian novel.
In between, Coover offers up a character study of a solitary but not necessarily lonely accountant at a turning point in his life. Whether Henry Waugh suffers a mid-life crisis or gains a renewed commitment to an authentic self, is a question left to the reader. Coover's prose is neat but never simpleminded; serious but lit up with a rake's wicked humour; and ultimately teasing in the way Waugh himself is tantalizingly there, and yet, what is imagined and what lies there on the page is not in the end so obvious.
Coover also traffics in extended puns; lyrics to imagined baseball ballads sounding as genuine and aged as crusty sea shanties; and a lively & true sense of dialogue.
And then, there is the UBA itself: doled out over the course of the novel, the rules and statistics, odds and principles predicated on baseball's unmatched statistical archive. Coover must have kept records as close and accurate as did Waugh in order to describe what little of the UBA he did. It is eerily similar to a game invented by Jack Kerouac as a teen and played through his adult life, including parallels in the number of teams in the league (8), fictional players and backgrounds, extensive context such as financial transactions and trades between fictional owners ... even the fact both Kerouac and Waugh played a fictional horseracing game on the side. (See the NYTimes article linked by the Wikipedia entry for Fantasy Baseball.)
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LibraryThing member NoLongerAtEase
The UBA is really a masterpiece. Coover is able to deftly blend exceptional writing, humor, a straight forwardly interesting plot, AND second order speculation about, among other things, the creative process and the nature of the cosmos.
If one were to peruse the reviews from 1968, when the novel
What makes the work truly great is that SI and the NYT are both essentially correct. UBA is a great baseball novel that also has a host of metaphysically interesting questions that can be found just below the surface level event; minimal digging required.
If one were to peruse the reviews from 1968, when the novel
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was first published, one would find that the New York Times praises the book's metaphorical aspects (and suggests that it's baseball content is a dispensable deus ex machina) while Sports Illustrated takes the opposite angle (suggesting that UBA is a baseball book through and through... posh on those trying to read too much into it). What makes the work truly great is that SI and the NYT are both essentially correct. UBA is a great baseball novel that also has a host of metaphysically interesting questions that can be found just below the surface level event; minimal digging required.
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LibraryThing member jbushnell
Fascinating novel about a man who invents a dice-based baseball simulator and manages it through dozens of fictional seasons. Conceptually very rich, and I don't think Coover always gets his due as a stylist: sentence for sentence, this is one of the most accomplished novels I've read in the last
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few years. Show Less
LibraryThing member francomega
Lonely middle-aged guy creates an all-consuming fantasy baseball league...in 1968. Sure, table top simulation games were around back then, but Henry Waugh takes it an Internet level of obsessiveness. This has been on my reading list for some time and it is tough to find--had to go the interlibrary
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loan route. Coover is an aggressively creative writer, but far too often I found myself struggling to stay afloat in the overflowing stream of consciousness. Granted, it's to be expected in a book about a slowly deteriorating mind, but their are consequences for the reader on the flip side of that.A lot of good lines--here's a favorite: "Besides, war was available to everybody, the space race to few: war was a kind of whorehouse for mass release of moonlust." Show Less
LibraryThing member stormville
One of my favorite books of all time. A book about an ordinary guy who lives a rich and very detailed fantasy life in a baseball game he has created (in pencil and paper, pre-computers and pre-internet). Contains some beautiful vignettes of early 1960's New York City, incidentally. J. Henry Waugh
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(the protagonist) is author-like, or godlike, in his devotion to his imagined world. Show Less
LibraryThing member chosler
Waugh is an accountant by days and prime mover of a fantasy baseball league entirely of his own creation by night, an obsession that gradually takes over his entire life. Profanity, sexual situations
LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
A great baseball book, though I suppose it is only tangentially about baseball. The final chapter is pretty disturbing, as are many of the passages throughout the book when Henry seems to no longer be able to differentiate between real life and the one he's created. This book is somewhat a book of
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the times, with some of the stream of consciousness-hipster-beat kind of riffing that I'm not all that fond of, but overall n outstanding novel. Show Less
LibraryThing member antiquary
Bittersweet sometimes humorous story of a man obsessed with his solo baseball rpg -- dice rolls determine everything, as in many games --nowadays, in the post D&D world, this is normal, but in 1971 he was presented as slightly insane --he is obsessed with the game to the point that it is costing
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him his job and his social life. The game like many games started as a fairly simple concept --a baseball game vwith resuts of pitches etc. decided by dice rolls --but has expanded to include a wider background including political parties. Show Less
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
One should always try to keep one's fantasy life separate from the real thing, but Robert Coover has created a charming parable about that sort of thing.
LibraryThing member datrappert
An enduring classic for anyone who has every spent hours rolling the APBA dice (or Strat-O-Matic, etc.) Accountant J. Henry Waugh has become so immersed in the baseball simulation he has created that then when the unthinkable--an extremely rare play--occurs, well...let's just say it gets weird from
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that point. Truly brilliant and unique. I suppose this could be about any obsession, but there's really no obsession like a baseball simulation, is there? :-) Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1968
Physical description
7 inches
ISBN
0452251273 / 9780452251274