The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

by Robert Coover

A satirical fable with a rootless and helpless accountant as the protagonist. Alone in his apartment, he spends all his nights and weekends playing an intricate baseball game of his own invention. The author has won the William Faulkner Award and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award.

Genres: Baseball, Fiction, Sports, Novels, Literature, American, 20th Century

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1968

About the author

Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Reviews

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Underrated gem - it's a difficult book, especially in the second half, but it has both beauty and daring going for it. The story of a man who gets more and more into his simulated baseball game. Less about baseball than about theology, and most of all it seems to me to be a parable about writing. It has some elements that I disliked - way too much nastiness for nastiness's sake - but the high points make up for it. Extremely creative. It also bears saying given the rise of fantasy sports: weirdly prescient.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is a story of escapism, a tale of fleeing from reality…

The bus was jammed, they had to stand. People jostled, rammed them moistly toward the rear. Rain drummed on the roof. If skyscrapers were penis-prisons, what were the buses? the efferent tubes? The driver barked orders. Passengers protested at the shoving. Lou was the biggest in sight, so everybody turned their darkest looks on him. A woman complained about getting elbowed, and though it wasn’t Lou’s fault, he tipped his hat in apology, dripping water from the brim onto the evening paper of a man sitting next to them. The paper spoke blackly of bombs, births, wars, weddings, infiltrations, and social events.

Reality seems to be a little bit hostile therefore the protagonist invented a sort of baseball role-playing game and throwing dice literally started dwelling in its virtuality ignoring everything around. And while his real life keeps disintegrating he lives in his cozy virtual world:

But anyway he was glad he had come tonight. Helped him see the bigger picture, loosen up a little. All came out the same in the end, he saw that now. Some won, some lost, it didn’t really matter; what mattered was… well… the Association, this whole thing, bigger than all of them, that they were all caught up in. When he tried to picture it in his mind, it fuzzed into a big blur, but in his heart and when they were all together like this, he knew what he meant. Yes, it was a terrific bunch of guys out there tonight. Most of them were old-timers, ballplayers he’d watched as a kid, old heroes, in their late fifties now…

The living, feats and habits of ballplayers appeal to me no more than life and behavior of cockroaches so in spite of the brilliant mythologisation twist in the last chapter I liked this novel less than the other books by Robert Coover.
We all live in reality but every one of us has one’s own little snug shelter in one’s own dreamworld.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one weird book. But I liked it a lot.

Two personal personality quirks might account for this:

1) The main character has created an entire fantasy baseball league, and is in the process of playing out year 56. Not with real players. Entirely created and maintained and imagined by J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Years are played out, deaths are mourned, injuries happen, he creates complete lives for each player, all centered around the game of baseball.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought at first this was five stars all the way. Loved the hokey old-timey baseball lingo, the imagined play by play, wisecrackery, the names, all the TWIBby "how 'bout that?" boyhood baseball wonder and a box of Cracker Jacks, the joys and sorrows of the personalities and stats, the history and the present, especially in that all of it -- the games and the chatter in the dugouts and off-field scandals -- very explicitly took place in an obsessive gamer's imagination. Laughed out loud when I learned what happened to the young ace at the end of chapter two! Really cared about what happened, saw it clearly, dimensionally. Loved how the story slipped in and out of Henry's fictional reality and the imagined reality occuring within Henry's head. Loved the related light-handed metafictional aspects about author and characters, how Coover is to Henry as Henry is to UBA players. Loved larger theological suggestions about freewill and fate: all just a lucky roll of the dice etc. Loved, therefore, the structure, the beautiful nested levels of reality among characters and themes. For the most part, again, also loved the language, which mostly popped and postured and swerved and swung for the fences with poise. But then after the second chapter, things fell off the table, intentionally, since Henry's deep deep immersion and enjoyment in his game would of course cost him in the so-called real world. Anyone who has something serious going on outside of what they do for money will relate. Poor Henry -- a loveable obsessive loser, a tragicomically thwarted genius up there with Ignatius P. Reilly, I'd say -- so deeply sees his game, so deeply believes in the existence of the players and coaches and alt-reality of the UBA, that he loses his grip, but then what happens if he loses his enthusiasm for the game? What's he have then? Very sad. Surprisingly poignant for such a smart book. Coover mimics the drying up of Henry's enthusiasm in the prose, which works in moderation but after a while weighed on my enthusiasm for the book itself, especially when it comes after a longish Ulysses-like bar scene complete with slurred imaginary baseball player speech. Generally, despite all the love for the above, I felt like things peaked early and then fell off the table in terms of my interest as Henry lost his shit and the game became endangered. Occasionally it perked up a bit but never regained its early peak for me. The ending that so many on here complain about didn't bother me, and in fact I sort of like how the players go on with their existence even if their God (Henry) isn't keeping track anymore. I liked the theological/philosophical suggestions but felt things maybe a little fuzzed with that sort of pomo playfulness involving so many characters (characterized mostly by their kooky names) gesticulating giddily and exclaiming excitedly lotsa silly turns o' phrase in alertly alliterative prose. Three point five stars, therefore, rounded up to four thanks to five-star sections particularly early on and overall inventiveness and great names (Witness York, my favorite). Now I gotta go hunt down my old Strat-o-Matic Baseball game in my parents' crawlspace -- note: the UBA game is more like the Strat-o-Matic boardgame than fantasy baseball, which involves teams consisting of real MLB players and mostly is all online these days. Much preferred the 242 pages of this baseball book to the 150 pages or so I read of The Art of Fielding.

[Rayroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now with Afterword

This is not a book about baseball. It's a book about a man who enjoys his solitude and crates a whole world of stats and player biographies in a fake a basball league that's (real?), the players live and die,break records as it's creator losses his fucking mind. He invets a whole league, he explains that he takes words he sees in real life and turns them into ball player names, I come up with few myself. Here is my starting line up and team name.
note the words used are words I seen working downtown Pittsburgh as a messenger.

Pittsburgh Undertows UBA team ba
1. Sprint Bassett ss
2. Shuck Niagara cf
3. Piatt Mccormick 2b
4. Oliver Randell 1b
5. Brook Coldwell lf
6. Kalbolt Koopers c
7. Bethlehem Seamans rf
8. Mellon Quick 3b
9. Swartz Cherry P


Afterword
What is truly wonderful is that there are so many ways a person can lose thier mind, create worlds out of thin air, drop out and go mad, but what's sane working a job to pay rent to live on the grid, to fuck, to have kids, to buy cars with cameras that help in parking, buy tomatos, tubbed chips, spray cheese,ritz, pork in yellow pakeages, milk that will go bad, friut and veggies (not from trees and garderns) go see the another version of Superman at the multiplex,what's sane about the modern word I tell you....fuck.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who, as a child, invented whole basketball teams: bouncing a ball on the narrow sidewalk between two houses, becoming each carefully imagined player, each with an age, height, weight, scoring average, assists, rebounds, shooting style, tendencies; imagining a basket and a backboard where none existed against the siding, shooting each unique way, and seeing if I could make them score and make them win; well, the idea of The Universal Baseball Association doesn't sound so crazy. I can understand coming across someone's name and thinking what position he'd play. The first time I heard of Abulhassan Bani Sadr, I thought, geez, he'd make a wonderful crafty left-handed relief pitcher.

Now pitching for the New York Mets, Number 23, Abulhassan Bani Saaaaaadr! (scattering of applause)

And Angelo 'Angie' Roncalli was not Pope John XXIII, but a grizzled veteran catcher. Of course, I didn't kill anybody, intentionally or otherwise, with a throw of the dice. And I didn't cross the line entirely and let everyone in real life actually become the individual members of the UBA. Nor did I make light of non-consensual sex. But J. Henry Waugh, Prop. is magnificently imagined, as is his game of dice baseball. Bartleby meets Frederick Exley.

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting going deep imagining of a man's imagining [about baseball] which if you're not really into it may leave a reader withered, but if you're into it [baseball] you just may love it, mostly, as I did.

[Andrew]

What shocked me, after hearing about Coover, was that the plot of the book isn't the star here, nor the characters. Rather, the charm of the book is almost entirely in the structure, which is remarkably playful, complex, and nuanced. I was expecting some sprawling Pynchonesque thing, but instead I got a fun, almost breezy, frequently comic novel touched with metafictional elements.

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnUi...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

Very dense and occasionally boring, but impossibly rewarding and filled with so, sooo many layers of meaning and with reflections on everything from loneliness to death, from artistic creation to control. A minor masterpiece for sure.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagine a man sitting quietly at a kitchen table. He sits before a jumble of papers illuminated by an overhead light. He's playing a game by throwing dice. His name is J. Henry Waugh. Suggests Jehovah, doesn't it? It's supposed to. Henry is the inventor of an incredibly complete and complex baseball game in which practically every possible event is determined by the roll of 3 dice. His Universal Baseball Association is a league of 8 teams populated by imaginary players. Henry plays seasons with these teams and players and not only keeps box scores for each game but also complete records and statistics for the current season and each preceding season, as well as a written commentary kept in a shelf-full of bound record books. Henry's zeal and love for his game has inspired him to meticulously record and maintain a voluminous history of the UBA, of each season as he's played it. The game Henry invented is so fully realized that even the biographical details of his players are provided for even into retirement and to the ends of their lives. As the novel opens the UBA is in its 56th season, Year LVI. But the game has become wearying. The impetus driving the game and his interest in it all is running down. He's begun to question why he bothers. This season, however, has a breath of fresh air about it in the form of a rookie pitcher named Damon Rutherford who's winning games and exciting Henry in ways he hasn't felt in a long time. But in this complex game system every possibility is thought of, even the accidental death of players. In this way, in a random throw of the dice, this young pitcher, Henry's favorite, is struck down. Henry's devastated and openly mourns for Rutherford and, in the end, in the spirit of a vengeful Jehovah or an Olympian god of the Greek pantheon, he does what he's never done before: he interferes in the game, changes a throw of the dice. He cheats. In order to save the game and save the world after the death of Rutherford, Henry's sense of balance has to be restored by the loss of another player, Jock Casey, who threw the deadly beanball. Casey's loss can be seen only as sacrifice. Coover has written parody, religious allegory.

Henry doesn't like the real game of baseball. What fascinates him is the arcane nature of the statistics. He knows that numbers equal magic, especially in baseball with its systems of 3s, 9s, and 7s. So he lives within his game rather than keeping up with the major leagues played every summer. Henry's Universal Baseball Association is so complete and so real that Henry is frequently lost in it, imagines he's surrounded by these players as he goes about his daily routines, drinking in a bar, at work, dining out. He revels in the history of the UBA and sees the rollicking and ribald discourse of the young crop of players as well as the retired oldtimers living on nostalgia and stories of the previous 55 seasons. Henry's surrender to the attraction of the game is such that it's become the most important thing in his life. He's in danger of being absorbed into the game. His social life deteriorates, his performance at work with an accounting firm is so unsatisfactory he's always on the brink of being let go.

The final chapter is a kind of coda. It takes place a hundred seasons later. Fact has become legend. The game has survived the turbulent Year LVI but now the events of that season have become ritual perpetuating the myth. Each season features a sacrificial rite of spring that allows Henry and his ballplayers to impose continuity and order on chaos by fashioning history and truth to fit their needs, just as we do in our lives outside his game. Rather than have his world exist as meaningless, without hope or belief, Henry gives the game an element which renews and casts meaning on the randomness of the 3 dice. All this is in line with the almost religious reverence of baseball as the Great American Game which has mythic meaning and whose heroes of the past approach deification.

I guess my enthusiasm for this novel shows. This was another reread of one of my favorite novels. I'll probably read it again someday. I'll never tire of Coover's rendering of how historical events in our world as well as the UBA tend, over time, to be stitched together with myth and ritual in order to give them meaning.

Rereading again in 2017.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Infinite Jest aside--that novel is in a league of its own starring Geena Davis, Rosie O'Donell, and Tom Hanks as the foul-mouthed ex-ballplayer with a heart of gold--this is best thing I've read all year. Here's why:

a) First, it's beautifully written. Robert Coover is often grouped with D Barthelme and J Barth, but he's a clearer writer than the former and a better stylist than the latter. On the strength of this work, I picked up a cheap copy of Pricksongs and Descants, a collection of Coover's short stories.

b) It's the best baseball novel I've ever read. Eric Rolfe's Greenberg The Celebrant was a wonderful bit of historical fiction, and The Natural was a brilliant dark allegory, but both concerned baseball as a spectator sport--the "American pastime," in other words. The UBA, on the other hand, concerns baseball as a record-keeping activity:

"So...he'd found his way back to baseball. Nothing like it really. Not the actual game so much--to tell the truth, real baseball bored him--but rather the records, the statistics, the peculiar balances between individual and team, offense and defense, strategy and luck, accident and pattern, power and intelligence. And no other activity in the world had so precise and comprehensive a history..."

"I found out the scorecards were enough. I didn't need the games."

c) It's the best book about the weird, imaginative, and esoteric obsessions that characterize the private lives of many nerdy males (even "normal" ones like Henry Waugh, who are capable of holding jobs, talking to people, etc.). Waugh, for example, invents a game that is really much more than that, as evidenced by the fact that his friend Lou Engel, upon being invited to play it, finds it neither enjoyable nor interesting because he can't "fill in the gaps" between dice rolls with invented storylines in the same way that Waugh does. I've gone through two such phases, first with "e-wrestling" from 1996-2000 and now with the Moustache Club of America (2002-2011)...and I can attest to the fact that the loneliness that accompanies such hobbies is simply ineffable.

d) And finally, when the novel arrives at its absurd conclusion in a league future that's become completely unmoored from its past, tUBA provides an excellent commentary on history:

"Can't even be sure about the simple facts. Some writers even argue that Rutherford and Casey never existed--nothing more than the ancient myths of the sun, symbolized as a victim slaughtered by the monster or force of darkness. History: in the end, you can never prove a thing."

And on agency:

"Beyond each game, he sees another, and yet another, in endless and hopeless succession. He hits a ground ball to third, is thrown out. Or he beats the throw. What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? Why does he swing? Why does he run? Why does he suffer when out and rejoice when safe? And when, after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to quit--but what does he mean, 'quit?' The game? Life? Could you separate them?"


If you don't understand or like baseball, speculative gaming writ large, and the like, you probably won't appreciate tUBA. Other reviewers on GR haven't, citing such reasons. But if you do, you'll quickly realize that this is one of the best books written in the last 50 years.

[Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this could easily be a five-star book...for someone else. Probably someone who likes baseball a lot more than I do. I'm definitely impressed with what it accomplishes; you could basically say it's an account of a man's life falling apart at the seams due to an obsession with a proto-World-of-Warcraft. And in that way, it's eerily prescient.

Well executed, too. Henry Waugh's fantasy baseball league is imagined from the ground up, complete with its own history and a huge group of fully realized players. I regard this as a major accomplishment for both Henry and Coover. And Henry's own narration drifts seamlessly in and out of his players' narration, which is itself pretty immersive. Towards the end, when Henry's sanity is in danger, he mixes up the names of the players in humorous and believable fashion.

I wish I could more clearly articulate what it was that made this book only okay for me. Part of it is of course that I don't like baseball, but that oversimplifies it. I can be made to like baseball, as I was for Delillo's Underworld. But that scene has a lot more to do with baseball's culture and tactile features: the peanuts, the dull roar, the stickiness of the floor beneath the seats. Waugh explicitly makes clear that he doesn't go in for any of that; he doesn't actually like real baseball. He likes the stats of it, and pares his game down to just that.

The other thing is probably that Coover, in some ways, seems like a poor man's Pynchon. Which is fine, but as I was reading this, I kept thinking, why aren't I reading some actual Pynchon? I've got Mason & Dixon sitting tantalizingly on my shelf right now, after all. Coover's mannerisms are similar: the whimsical raunch, the "Oboy!", the manic wordplay. But he doesn't pull it off quite as well.

Also, the title. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.? Seriously? I almost never picked it up just because of that.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, first things first, I don't give a damn about baseball. This book probably would have meant more to me if I did, but I enjoyed it a lot nonetheless. It's too bad my baseball-loving father doesn't give a damn about experimental novels-maybe between the two of us we would have been able to make a bit more sense of this thing.

But anyway, this is only tangentially a novel about baseball. It's more about imagination, and creativity, and statistics, and rules, and (ugh, sorry-but I can't think of a better way to put it) a character's attempt to construct meaning out of nothingness. As Waugh himself reminds us throughout the book, real baseball does nothing for him.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though: J. Henry Waugh is one of the all-time great miserably pathetic protagonists, a man with little to no understanding of life, or the lines dividing life and fantasy, or human interaction, or romance, or sex, or generally speaking how to function as an adult. His solution is to lose himself in a series of exceptionally complex games of his own devising, the most recent of which is the Universal Baseball Association, played by means of dice and charts and populated with some truly hilariously-named players (Pappy Rooney, Swanee Law, Brock Rutherford, Witness York, Hatrack Hines, Darlin' Harlan Handsome, Sycamore Flynn... I could go on for quite some time).

We can all guess what's coming, of course: he confuses real people with his own characters, assumes the identity of various baseball players and managers, is plunged into despondency by make-believe tragedies, and so on. Coover manages to make this immensely enjoyable to read about, though--up until the epilogue, which is up there (for me) with Blood Meridian in terms of sheer head-scratching confusion. I'll have to re-read it, I suppose.

[Virginia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm eager to discuss this book primarily because of how much I disliked it.

Moments ago, I summarized it for my husband, and he said, "That sounds interesting. I'd never read it, but if you were stoned and had that idea for a book, it'd be pretty exciting."

That's the gist: If I were intoxicated or otherwise impaired and had the idea for this book, it would be exciting. Now, running that idea out for 242 pages is simply mad, and let's face it, cruel.

I understand why this book is considered great by some. The premise is intriguing. The climax (if it can aptly be referred to as such) is interesting. The delivery is unique.

However, what Coover bought in originality he sold in execution. Originality does not buy a writer out of good storytelling. The strongest emotion I had during the reading of this: to sock Coover in the face.

I feel strongly that any niche can successfully be exploited for metaphoric value in fiction regardless of its obscurity, so long as it is done well. Baseball is far from obscure, but the metaphor of the game in these pages is so utterly alienating that Coover might as well be writing about bike polo.

In his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon gives comic books as critical a role as any of the main characters. However, the reader doesn't need to be a comic aficionado to appreciate the context. When I finished Kavalier & Clay I wanted to know more about comics; when I finished The Universal Baseball Association I wanted to never hear a word about baseball again.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sports...

"War seemed to be a must for every generation. A pageant to fortify the tribal spirit. A columnist plumped for bloodless war through the space race. Henry sympathized with the man, but it could never work. Mere abstraction. People needed casualty lists, territory footage won and lost, bounded sets with strategies and payoff functions, supply and communication routes disrupted or restored, tonnage totals, and deaths, downed planes, and prisoners socked away like a hoard of calculable runs scored. Besides, war was available to everybody, the space race to few: war was a kind of whorehouse for mass release of moonlust. Lunacy: anyway, he sure wasn't inventing it."

"The dice and charts and other paraphernalia were only the mechanics of the drama, not the drama itself."

...or spectator sports? Reading this Coover dredged up a lot of childhood debris, a lot of loose material affectively sedimented around baseball. My mother remarried in 1990 when I was 8. Master Sergeant Dad had forever been off at Ft. Hooah doing whatever. Suddenly playing catch and watching the 6:30am SportsCenter before work and school became a thing. An entire era of my dirt poor Georgia-boy life is concentrated in the mindlessly specific signifier "Sid Bream." I had baseball cards in laminated sheets in 3-ring binders, Beckett guides, enthusiasm and opinions and a family! We played and cheered and knew all the names and had favorites and memories and speculations! As adolescence dawned a short couple years later, my sister moved out and I followed suit as soon as I could, trading a known quantity of religious repression for an unknown quantity of drunken military domineering (where at least skateboarding was ok even if long hair was seditious). They pawned my card collection for unpretty pennies but I kept my glove. I haven't given a shit about sports for 25 years. Not even when it was my turn to be stepdad and I co-coached a 12-and-under team from a 1-11 start to a skin-of-the-teeth championship 2 years later. But I like ping pong and frisbee. In theory.

Sports provide drama, history, and politics for millions of people with poor taste. For the perennially disempowered it purveys the mirage of something happening, whereby that guy doing that thing with that ball assumes cosmogonic significance. I've lived it, I get it, but I don't hear the music. People should play more and watch less. Fandom is the hollowest solidarity. That's already too much soc-pol-econ vitriol for today.

Coover makes clear that it's all about the story: the names, the frames, chummy argot, mythical sagas and struggles, irreversible climaxes and missed chances. For J. Henry Waugh, it makes no difference that it's all completely made up, or any difference it does make makes it better. DeLillo (in that other book about a baseball) was rightly fascinated by the fact that radio announcers in olden-times would have to conjure a game from nothing but a scoresheet. Coover beat my expectations with this one, despite some repetitive sections getting the glossy speed-read, but his imitative tone is dead on and I just love the way he writes, like some Hemingwayesque acolyte on absinthe doing a screenplay for the next Marvel Superheroes movie about the Marquis de Sade, as told by John Wayne (Gacy).

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man, I love baseball. It's hard to write about the literary merits of this mind-bending book, of which there are DEFINITELY many (in short, without talking about baseball, the created world becomes the real world), without talking about baseball. And the fact that Coover created a complex board game equivalent of modern fantasy/tabletop baseball that used statistics in ways that were never discussed until Billy Beane's SABRmetric-focused appearance in "Moneyball." But the world that Coover creates is a beautiful mix of old baseball (reminding me a lot of old WP Kinsella novels, harking back to the glory days of early 1900s baseball) and experimental literature immersed in philosophical pursuits of perfection, fate, death, and, of course (because every goddamn book I read better get at this question at some point), what is the meaning of everything.

Highly recommended, though recommended all the more to people who know a thing or two about baseball, otherwise you might get lost in the stats and the gameplay descriptions, though there's a lot more going on in the text.

[Olin Postlethwait · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly 2.5 Stars. I don't know if it was the high expectations (Robert Coover's "The Public Burning" is one of my all time favorite books) or if it was the story. But I was generally uninterested throughout the book.

I was expecting more focus on the main protagonist (who ends up more as a D&D-esque sports narrator than a protagonist) rather than a book revealing the drama of an imaginary baseball season that plays in Henry's head.

I think the level of disappointment adds to the 2-star rating vs 3-star. Not a bad book by any means, just meh.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this one by Coover. It's probably as aided by the fact that I also love baseball. I listen to podcasts and the radio broadcasts of my favorite team. The way Coover captures the game is pitch perfect. In fact the only quibble I have is that Coover is a Reds fan.

[Luke Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Come for the baseball, stay for the songs.

OR: Dungeons and Dragons for the deeply mentally sick who also love Lou Gehrig

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me be the millionth person to offer this aperçu: when one gets onto a Tetris jag and plays for hours at a time and then, say, walks outside for the first time in a week, one will absolutely start to see bricks and breezeblocks and shingles on the façades of buildings falling in the shape of tetrominoes and one will be inclined to manipulate them in one’s mind ’cause Tetris is some seriously addictive, hallucinogenic shit. Tetris is also, pace comrade Pajitnov, pretty simple. I have never, while in the nadir of a Tetris bender, considered, for instance, the inner lives of the shapes, what their thoughts were about fashioning completed rows, or whether they resented being manipulated by an unseen actor. Perhaps, like model Soviets, they relished their collective labor. Perhaps too, the six regular pieces all came to resent the most coveted long column-y one (some animals are more equal than others, etc.). So then consider an impossibly more complex game, like baseball, and how one’s mind might be altered by reckoning with the pieces and possible moves of such a monstrously elaborate network of possibilities and outcomes. Enter Coover’s Universal Baseball Association and J. Henry Waugh, the proprietor of his own alternate reality. The UBA is Waugh’s invention, essentially a boardgame, akin to Dungeons and Dragons, that simulates a baseball game through the use of three dice, nine schedules dictating the outcome of rolled dice combinations, and one really robust imagination. Waugh, who works (badly) as an accountant by day, has conjured (and memorized) enough players to populate eight teams for fifty-six years of play, and he keeps the records of all games played, and statistics from those games, in volumes throughout his nondescript apartment in an unspecified city. The real animating element of Waugh’s play – and the reader’s insights – comes in the crafting of what is called The Book, the chronicle of the league’s heroes and villains and historically significant moments and evolution from pastime to professional sport. The Book that Waugh keeps – that which he kind of composes in his mind throughout his waking life – is about half of what the reader reads in this novel, which novel shifts between the third-person narration of Coover writing Waugh and of Waugh writing the UBA, which latter gradually takes over as the novel develops, concluding with total immersion. So, okay, so the gist here is that the novelist is like the isolated D&D player pathetically inventing a world peopled by characters that most people won’t care about in the hopes that some might (the novel here being a game of infinite permutations (like baseball) within a structure of rules and expectations). And then also we see here an iteration of Baudrillardian simulacrum whereby the subject can’t distinguish between the real and the simulation of the real in the person of J, Henry Waugh who slowly but inexorably becomes separated from his reality. Coover, though, doesn’t do a lot to emphasize these points, and can’t seem to offer anything of Waugh’s inner life – outside of what he’s thinking about the game – to allow the reader to sympathize with or understand him more deeply. I came away wanting to know more about Waugh, and more about how he writes The Book, and more about what it felt like to lose an imaginary friend. But then I know what it feels like to get lost in a game, to have a meaningless game present itself as a vastly more captivating world than the one I normally occupy, and so maybe I know enough about Waugh already and can infer what his loss feels like. If you’re really into baseball or Dungeons and Dragons (or Tetris) this is worth your time.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of this novel reads like a Charlie Kaufman script - sad sack at dead-end job creates and immerses himself into a creative world that fractures then floods what little arks of order and sailboats of sanity buoyed and bounced the boy through the seas of anonymous adulthood. And, to make it more painful, attempting to explain the rules and regulations, the priveleges and privations of the population of this interior planet just pushes real ("real" i.e. adult, happy in day-to-day anonymity) people away. Hell, scares the livin' bejeebus out of them. To borrow and bend from David Foster Wallace a bit, these outsiders walk away thinking, "You have all that inside you, and to me it's a mess. Want no part of it. No, no part for me. Loon." Sure, the guy in this novel is playing a tabletop game, Dungeons and Dragons in a Dugout, but he could also be writing poetry, collecting old photographs, singing ballads into a boombox.

You get the point.

But what really elevates this book into the realm of majesty is the eighth and final chapter (funny how Coover stuck so close to baseball numerals that he didn't find a way to divide the novel into nine chapters) that reveals baseball (in main character's world) to have transcended its origins as a game, a sport and pasttime, and become a sort of annual ritual sacrifice of a handpicked Favored Son, like something out of The Golden Bough (Sir James Frazer). ... Yes... That's right... Boughsball.

Note: Also enjoyed the list of Other Signet Paperbacks at the back of the book, like Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In No. 1: "It's chicken jokes, party time, graffiti, etc. twenty-four hours a day instead of one precious hour per week!" Also, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In No. 2: Mod Mod World. Haw!

[Pat Settegast · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically, this is a pre-D&D roleplaying geekout disguised as a quite elegant baseball novel. The sports writing is stellar but the plot seems to plod pretty predictably along, and frankly I didn't get the ending at all...! I thought there'd be nine chapters because of all the stuff about numerology, but there were only 8... and the author decided to create this kind of meta-russian roulette round out of the last chapter: that seemed a little sloppy: I was just starting to like some of the other imaginary people and then its like climax time and we begin introductions all over again. I could have missed something, but I doubt it. So, I'd recommend this book to anybody who likes either baseball or larping (I know wierd combo, right?) or anybody who wants to write better about baseball because some of the sport language just sings! But forget the ending, you know? Or better yet, write your own.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love to read a book, especially when recommended by a friend, and think “oh yeah, this is an all-timer for me.” I love everything about this book. The beatnik-esque prose, the imagination behind the fantasy baseball game, the themes of healthy/unhealthy passion, isolation, and the longing for someone to just please fucking understand what you’re trying to do with your life every single day. A beautiful, bruising novel.

[Campbell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointed with this one. I wanted to learn more about Henry but instead the focus was instead on the players he created. Ultimately frustrating.

[Matt Ely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typically, a few times per year, I will finish a title and immediately think to myself, "That was a perfect book." Did Coover write The Great American Novel? No, I don't think anyone is claiming that. But I remained engaged with the book enough to see that, by the end, it accomplished everything it set out to do in an unexpected and unique way. And, just as importantly, it resonated with me personally.

I think that resonance depends on personal factors. I'm a baseball fan with an analytical inclination. More than that, like the protagonist, I could easily find myself saying that it's sometimes more fun to observe the statistical records, to think about the idea of baseball, than to observe the game itself. Is this fundamental to the plot itself? No, but a familiarity with the inclination of fans to add narrative, to create the artifice of grand design behind the banal contact of bat and ball, is helpful to understanding Henry's project.

It also helps to be comfortable with an ambiguous relationship between the real and imagined world. If I were writing an academic paper, I might focus on simulation as a "liminal space" between fantasy and fact. The book asks, by implication, how our own fantasies take on lives of their own and how different those lives are from ours. And how do our imagined lives reflect the best and worst of us?

I want to say a great deal more, but for the sake of remaining spoiler-free, I'll refrain. It's completely understandable if this doesn't resonate with readers. Frankly, I've been struggling to think of who to recommend it to. But I think if you can enter into the book with an open mind and take all the baseball descriptions to be more than merely baseball descriptions, the novel will reward the effort.

[Tyrone_Slothrop (ex-MB) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Take me out to the ballgame

Questa mia prima lettura di Robert Coover è stata di grande soddisfazione: l'autore fa parte del gruppo della prima generazione di scrittori "post-moderni" USA ma, per qualche motivo, non gode (almeno in Italia) della fama di Gass, Pynchon o Barth.
Ammetto che la forza e la bellezza di questa opera è difficilmente apprezzabile per chi non conosce il "passatempo nazionale americano", cioè il baseball - gioco complicato e incomprensibile per il neofita, ma che racconta moltissimo dello spirito americano e che si presta in modo unico ad essere materiale letterario. E qui, Coover indovina una costruzione visionaria e quasi mitologica geniale - il classico "loser" americano, impiegato solitario dalla vita vuota, si ri-inventa dio creatore di un universo alternativo dove genera giocatori (con la potenza di portarli in vita dandogli un nome), organizza partite (controllate però dall'elemento del caso, cioè da tre dadi), gestisce vite e morti non risparmiando eventi morbosi e disturbanti.
Come prevedibile, il protagonista finisce per confondere vita reale e immaginaria e la narrazione si adegua a questa deriva portando anche il lettore dentro l'universo di Henry, fino ad un capitolo finale meraviglioso e rutilante dove ho colto echi shakespeariani e joyciani e dove il talento di scrittore di Coover rifulge. La fine è, a tutti gli effetti, una epifania carica di misticismo ed esistenzialismo che, con il suo stile rutilante e barocco, sembra veramente portare il lettore in uno spazio simil-sacrale (quale, in effetti, per certi versi è il baseball nella cultura USA). Interessantissimo anche il filo rosso cabalistico dove i numeri stocastici determinano gli eventi, ma sembrano assumere significati ulteriori (e il baseball è lo sport statistico e numerico per antonomasia - ancora di più oggi).

Per chi ne avesse possibilità, consiglio in ogni modo la lettura in originale - Coover ha uno stile a tratti complesso e stratificato, ma molto ricco e godevolissimo. D'altra parte, è impossibile parlare di baseball in italiano!

[Coop Lipski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book read by the wacky baseball announcer, what’s new.

This book isn’t really about baseball and I’m left wondering what it is about. Is it about God? Lunacy? Addiction?

Yes, baseball is the main proponent of the story because it is the easiest sport to write a story about. The batter v. pitcher battle can easily be described using parallels to say King Arthur and his duel with a dragon or a pair of cowboys squaring off at high noon. If Henry Waugh had an electric football game as his sport of choice, would the story be as fun? But the story is not directly a baseball story.

Waugh, a God, created this world. He mediates stat lines and seasons, but also has the ability to decide who lives and who dies. He is the lead author of this world but he writes for no one but himself, for no one would understand what this represents to him. He begins to sympathize with the beings of his creation after the death of one of his players.

His life spirals because of the consequences he has created and in which he must abide by. The story begs the question for the players, created for this fictional world of, “If God is real, what is our purpose in this existence created solely for baseball?” It seems unfair to be prisoners in this baseball world, and Waugh becomes a prisoner in two.

Would we understand God for his creation as an outsider? I don’t know but, this is a fun little baseball book.

[Logan Hansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Altogether slightly too inscrutable and uncompromising for me, but the ending was a spectacular drawing together of loose threads. Would recommend if you like fantasy sports and postmodern wonkiness.

[Molly Hadfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I too love to crash out about fantasy baseball.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve read this one before, long ago, and re-read it now with a purpose: to see if it’s a good fit for a class a friend and I are preparing on fandom and faith. This one certainly has both. Our protagonist – whose name may be a play on Yahweh – invents a fantasy baseball game and populates it not just with statistics but also personalities. When a character emerges as a great new hope for him, but is then killed through an unlikely and unlucky roll of the dice, he eventually reimagines him as a quasi-Christ figure, a necessary sacrifice for the league to continue. And since the league increasingly becomes his life, since he increasingly loses touch with reality, it’s a sacrifice to give his own life continued meaning.

Even a capsule summary like that gives a sense of the potential poignancy and black comedy that sit side by side. Henry craves connection and he craves meaning, but the modern world denies him. As an accountant, he’s drawn to the power of probability, of the capacity for numbers to give a skeleton of meaning. He needs more, though, and that’s where the stories and characters of his imagined world are born.

This is a classic of its time. That’s evident in part by the way it foreshadows a condition we see fairly often in the 21st Century. Most of us know someone caught up in – if not altogether lost in – an imagined online community. Most of us see some of that impulse in ourselves, whether through Facebook, fantasy sports, or just idly web-surfing.

In such a light, this novel takes on perhaps a new power than when it was written. It lets us see this contemporary phenomenon as it looked to someone with the capacity to imagine it before we could really experience it. In that way, I admire it maybe more than I did when I read it a quarter century ago, when it was already established as one of the works of the early 1970s with a chance at enduring.

At the same time, this is uncomfortably in love with its concept at a technical, narrative level. It’s not so much that it’s hard to read as it slips from fantasy to reality without warning, but rather that it isn’t that joyful a reading experience. Henry has a sense of these characters, and that sense comes to define him, but there isn’t quite enough meat in the stories of the Association itself. That is, much of what fascinates Henry is actually pretty tedious – and I say that as a fan of baseball and baseball literature.

I love the concept here; this is a high and memorable imaginative achievement. As I re-read it, though, I can’t imagine sharing it with students; I imagine most would be thrown by the method and bored by the details of the imagined world.

I wish this were a short story instead, and I imagine in such form that it would be as powerful as it is in novel form with the benefit of allowing Henry to emerge more fully from his imagined universe. As it is, this remains haunting and hysterical. Some of its writing technology hasn’t aged well, but there’s no mistaking it still as anything but an inspired look at madness, fandom, and the weight of religious faith.