Fiona’s Reviews > The Art of Fielding > Status Update

“At the risk of becoming sentimental, let me say that you’ve been integral to my life for a long time. I read your book when I was fourteen, and it bolstered my courage at a moment when my courage was required.
“When we met, three years ago, it was because you selected me for the Maria Westish Award—another reason I’ll always be grateful to you. Because barring that I would never have come to Westish,

Yes, Henry had helped them get here, whatever they accomplished they owed in part to him, but to win these last twelve games they’d had to fill the gap left by his absence as quickly as possible, and once you healed the Henry gap you had no place for Henry.

Affenlight was familiar with the kind of man who wilted around men but bloomed when dealing with women—supremely heterosexual, indifferent to or disdainful of or afraid of other men, but also supremely attuned to women’s needs and interests. David had bloomed just that way when Pella walked in.

it was bliss, he felt, to be here with Owen and to read to him, even when he was reading dry-as-dust sentences from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Of all the activities two people could do together in private, Affenlight had a special fondness for reading aloud. Maybe this was part of his instinct for solitude and self-enclosure; a way to reveal himself while hiding behind someone else’s words.

Mike, looking happier than Pella had yet seen him, roamed the room, browsing the endless shelves, until he found The Book itself—the oversize, hand-set, Arion Press Moby-Dick that her dad had bought for a thousand dollars in 1985 and was now worth thirty times more, not that you could assign a value to such a dear and beautiful thing.

In the spring of 1880, Herman Melville, then sixty years old, was working as a customs inspector at the Port of New York, having proved unable to support his family through literary work. He was not famous and earned almost nothing from royalties. His first-born son, Malcolm had committed suicide thirteen years earlier. Melville’s in-laws, among others, feared for his health and regarded him as insane.