sla book review: the legend of mickey tussler

the legend of mickey tussler

Reviewed by Kathleen Sullivan, Southern Methodist University

APRIL 30, 2008 archive

The Legend of Mickey Tussler

Frank Nappi’s first baseball novel, The Legend of Mickey Tussler, follows Mickey’s rookie season as a pitcher with the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers, an affiliate of the Boston Braves in the 1940s. Nappi’s work will interest anyone who enjoys first baseball novels about rookies in the tradition of Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen (The Southpaw) or Bernard Malamud’s Roy Hobbs (The Natural), but Nappi’s work lacks the humor of Harris and the tragedy of Malamud. Mickey Tussler is neither funny nor anguished. He is more simply the unfortunate victim of both an abusive father who can neither understand nor appreciate his son’s special gifts on and off the baseball field and a jealous teammate who is determined to end his career before it truly begins. As a victim, Mickey is easily pitied, but such pity rarely compels a reader to wonder what will happen next to a character who has overwhelming odds stacked against him. The game is, in a sense, over before it begins.

Nappi’s work owes a great deal to The Natural. Both Mickey Tussler and Roy Hobbs are rubes, inexperienced young men from the country who embark on professional athletic careers, make terrible romantic mistakes with women, and survive physical hardship, returning from these disasters to play baseball. What makes Roy a more compelling character than Mickey, however, is Roy’s long struggle toward self-actualization. Roy has the potential for learning about himself and life through the consequences of his mistakes. Mickey, on the other hand, suffers from autism and from seventeen years of terrible mental and physical abuse. This trauma will haunt him for the rest of his life, limiting his possibilities for recovery in any meaningful way, even with the assistance of a doting mother, Molly Tussler, and a supportive manager, Arthur “Murph” Murphy who discovers him, helps him join the Brewers, provides him with a place to live, and genuinely cares about his and his mother’s well being.

Mickey’s limited mental capacity is also reminiscent of Benjy Compson’s from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness prose allows us immediate and unlimited access to Benjy’s mind in the novel’s first section, “April Seventh, 1928.” Nappi provides us with less access to Mickey’s thoughts by using italics to indicate what is happening in Mickey’s mind: “Three balls and two strikes; fire it in there; Murph is frowning; wind in my face; six rows of apples, five deep; what’s Oscar doing; my stomach hurts” (58). These fleeting impressions are sometimes touching (Oscar is his favorite pet, a pig), but not intriguing. Mickey also repeats his favorite nursery rhyme, his attempt to console himself and remember his mother when he is harassed by members of his own team or by fans, but his thoughts are rarely interesting enough to create a memorable character. Instead, Mickey’s connection to his mother and her role in the novel are by far the most interesting facets of Nappi’s work. Molly Tussler is the heart of The Legend of Mickey Tussler.

In this passage, Nappi’s prose is a delicate picture of Molly’s heartbreak in the grip of a loveless marriage. She has become trapped in a house that no longer holds her son:

Molly caught her reflection, a distorted image cast unexpectedly in the soapy water of a washbasin. She stopped scrubbing, as if startled by a stranger, brought her wrinkled fingers to her face, and touched deliberately, trying to substantiate what her eyes had just revealed. Her skin, damp with an early evening humidity, seemed to wither beneath her touch, a gradual fading that alarmed her as never before. She dropped her head and wept openly.

Her heart felt as though it were precariously resting between two stone walls drawing closer and closer, inches away from pressing together. She had survived all these years by not focusing on the vast parameters of the world at large but on what was immediately around her. It usually worked. She could lose herself in the mixing of animal feed or the husking of corn. She knew just how to wash a cow’s udder—a warm cloth and gentle strokes—so as not to alarm the animal prior to milking. She could even spend a whole afternoon bottle-feeding the lambs. But occasionally, this vapid existence preyed upon her more tender sensibilities, awakened now and again by glimpses of what could have been, and she cried out in painful protest for the life she really desired but had yet to cultivate. (101)

Without Mickey in her home, she absorbs herself in the farm and nurtures its animals. She creates a peaceful existence for herself, but that world is often shattered by the abuses of her husband, who treats her cruelly. Her devotion to her son is only matched by the repulsion she feels toward her husband. This situation leads the novel into unchartered familial territory, one that might offer her and her son hope for the future.

As Murph learns more about Molly and Mickey, his life becomes more entwined in theirs. He treats them with a kindness she has never known. She soon contemplates having an affair with the manager who is providing housing and moral support for her son. Murph and Molly’s mutual affection develops slowly, made more poignant by his inability to build lasting romantic relationships in the past: “His whole life smelled of failure, and of the shame and restlessness that attaches itself to such failure over time. These collapses of promised success seemed to him to be frequent and numerous, and in no way limited to the baseball diamond” (233). In this manner, Murph exhibits the kind of self-actualization reminiscent of Henry Wiggen and Roy Hobbs, the kind that Mickey is not capable of experiencing. Perhaps this should have been his legend, not Mickey’s.

When Murph and Molly finally admit their mutual attraction, Nappi’s prose is engaging:

Murph gripped the sides of his chair, his heart brimming with a blind tenderness. ‘You know, Molly, I’ve thought about you. Often.’

She smiled uncomfortably. "I know, Arthur. I know. I’ve thought about you too."

A silent energy passed between them and stole their voices. In the dying light of the afternoon, they sat staring at each other noncommittally—struggling with an odd amalgam of both shame and confusion. There was so much to be said—so much emotion bubbling just beneath the surface—yet they sat quietly, neither daring to tear at the veil between them for fear of unleashing the many delights and wonders that would no doubt overpower them (265).

Molly and Murph together create a safe world for Mickey, who, against all odds, seems to be happy at the end of the novel. This is ultimately a story about Molly and Murph’s relationship which survives through the harshest of circumstances. Thus, Nappi’s work is better thought of as a delicate rendering of an imperfect relationship that grows through a connection to baseball than the legend of an individual player.

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