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The Seventh Babe
Baseball fiction that flies high above its genre
- GenresBaseball
352 pages, Paperback
First published April 28, 1979
27 people want to read
About the author
Neil D. Isaacs
32 books7 followersNeil Isaacs is Emeritus Professor of English (BA, Dartmouth College; MA Brown University), University of Maryland College Park, and a retired clinical social worker (MA, University of Maryland).
Neil has written books on a range of topics including literary studies, clinical studies, sports histories, and cultural studies.
Neil has written books on a range of topics including literary studies, clinical studies, sports histories, and cultural studies.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 29, 2014
I may have just found my new favorite Jerome Charyn. While it doesn't hurt that one of his subjects is the Boston Red Sox in this thirty-five year old novel (which is to say, well before the team won the World Series again), there are plenty of reasons to love it.
One of them is that it emphasizes all over again Charyn's great subject as a novelist, that he writes the literature of the unbowed. His characters tend to be foundlings who have innate abilities in a particular field, but their stories always feature great adversity and an unwillingness to concede to it.
The Seventh Babe brings readers back to the baseball of Babe Ruth, a few seasons after he's been traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees. To Boston fans, this is an eternal moment of infamy, but to New Yorkers the start of its greatest era. The character of the title is Charyn's fictional seventh ballplayer to sport the nickname "Babe," which is just one of the many details typical of his books that most writers would never even think about, the deep sense of context, immersion, that he brings to all his subjects.
And yet that immersion never gets in the way of the universalism that lies at the heart of each story. Charyn seems to take great pains to put his stories into the hands of the readers who will most understand that his goal isn't to impress the easily impressed or offend the easily offended, but those looking for the divine in the midst of the absurd. This may not be wholly unexpected from a writer whose patron saint is Isaac Babel. But in this case, the student must surely at this point be understood to have overtaken the master.
What Charyn has consistently identified, and I think this is why his followers are more often foreign than domestic, is the barbarism at the heart of America. And I mean this in the most generous way possible. Again and again, he discovers the same foundling outsiders and the whores nearly capable of loving them, surrounded by savagery disguised as civility.
"Whores" is a strong word to use, but his women tend to spring forth from brothels. Charyn is clearly devoted to them, not so much in a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold way, but finding the reasons they ended up with such a fate, one that persons of either gender, in truth, have stumbled into in his stories. It's just that, Charyn's America is dominated by compromised women. And yes, men too. In an era and certainly evoking a legend very easy to glamorize, baseball is prime territory for this impulse. Fans who experienced Pete Rose's banning and the steroids scandal are perhaps more uniquely suited to embrace the "Black Sox" elements also featured in the book, things that happened after its publication.
I looked around a little and saw that critics at the time seem to have lumped Seventh Babe with the baseball books of others. Maybe Charyn got the idea to do his because of those efforts, but it's incredibly hard to view his as anything other than his own. He goes to such lengths to explore Babe Ragland's whole career, encompassing the era in such striking detail that it becomes far less about baseball than a life spent devoted to an idea.
At some point, I stopped thinking about the Red Sox and instead became absorbed in Ragland's odyssey (Charyn's character always experience odysseys), which ends pitch-perfectly. In fact, the ending is so perfect, it's the whole reason I became convinced that this must surely be the author's finest effort to date.
But then, there are still many Jerome Charyn books I haven't read yet. Oh, and this is also the first one that I could very easily see as a movie (none of his material has been adapted to the big screen to date). Could we get working on that?
One of them is that it emphasizes all over again Charyn's great subject as a novelist, that he writes the literature of the unbowed. His characters tend to be foundlings who have innate abilities in a particular field, but their stories always feature great adversity and an unwillingness to concede to it.
The Seventh Babe brings readers back to the baseball of Babe Ruth, a few seasons after he's been traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees. To Boston fans, this is an eternal moment of infamy, but to New Yorkers the start of its greatest era. The character of the title is Charyn's fictional seventh ballplayer to sport the nickname "Babe," which is just one of the many details typical of his books that most writers would never even think about, the deep sense of context, immersion, that he brings to all his subjects.
And yet that immersion never gets in the way of the universalism that lies at the heart of each story. Charyn seems to take great pains to put his stories into the hands of the readers who will most understand that his goal isn't to impress the easily impressed or offend the easily offended, but those looking for the divine in the midst of the absurd. This may not be wholly unexpected from a writer whose patron saint is Isaac Babel. But in this case, the student must surely at this point be understood to have overtaken the master.
What Charyn has consistently identified, and I think this is why his followers are more often foreign than domestic, is the barbarism at the heart of America. And I mean this in the most generous way possible. Again and again, he discovers the same foundling outsiders and the whores nearly capable of loving them, surrounded by savagery disguised as civility.
"Whores" is a strong word to use, but his women tend to spring forth from brothels. Charyn is clearly devoted to them, not so much in a stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold way, but finding the reasons they ended up with such a fate, one that persons of either gender, in truth, have stumbled into in his stories. It's just that, Charyn's America is dominated by compromised women. And yes, men too. In an era and certainly evoking a legend very easy to glamorize, baseball is prime territory for this impulse. Fans who experienced Pete Rose's banning and the steroids scandal are perhaps more uniquely suited to embrace the "Black Sox" elements also featured in the book, things that happened after its publication.
I looked around a little and saw that critics at the time seem to have lumped Seventh Babe with the baseball books of others. Maybe Charyn got the idea to do his because of those efforts, but it's incredibly hard to view his as anything other than his own. He goes to such lengths to explore Babe Ragland's whole career, encompassing the era in such striking detail that it becomes far less about baseball than a life spent devoted to an idea.
At some point, I stopped thinking about the Red Sox and instead became absorbed in Ragland's odyssey (Charyn's character always experience odysseys), which ends pitch-perfectly. In fact, the ending is so perfect, it's the whole reason I became convinced that this must surely be the author's finest effort to date.
But then, there are still many Jerome Charyn books I haven't read yet. Oh, and this is also the first one that I could very easily see as a movie (none of his material has been adapted to the big screen to date). Could we get working on that?
October 27, 2022
Think you love baseball? You ain't seen nothin' yet. There's a publisher, Summer Game Books, that does books about baseball, and they just brought out this stunner. Babe Ragland, a left-handed third baseman (I know, that's impossible) who is the seventh Babe after Babe Ruth (I checked and YES there were six real players called Babe) comes from nowhere (if you build it, they will come) to rise to a crazy stardom in the Boston Red Sox (I checked - the games are pretty much 100% accurate) then got drummed out of MLB ("canceled" in today's parlance - and of course there's a "dame" involved) and has only one choice: to play with what were called the Negro Leagues - and yes, many of the best players of all time were black. It is one of the great crimes of the sport and America as a whole that African-Americans were kept out of many sports in those days. The inside baseball stuff in The Seventh Babe is the best I've ever seen and many of the characters really lived.
January 17, 2013
My favorite baseball novel of all time. Enjoyable and heartfelt from start to finish. A left handed third baseman for the Red Sox named Babe Ragland and his hunchbacked sidekick Scarborough. A winner.
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March 12, 2011Lefty 3rd baseman for the Red Sox.
May 24, 2016
Date approximate
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews