Guide to Baseball Novels: M

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An exceedingly old-fashioned novel; the central idea is in fact taken from a 1951 juvenile by Allison & Hill. It's a wisecracking tale akin to '70s romps like All G.O.D.'s Children and Screwballs, or earlier comic novels like A Pennant for the Kremlin. To its credit, it's self-consciously old-fashioned, and if you can endure lots of wry comedy and snappy dialogue, you might like it.


An appealing magical-realist novel, Joy in Mudville shows the influence of Kinsella, but is lighter and more lyrical than any of Kinsella's fantasies. The first reviewers also compared the book to the work of E.L. Doctorow; McAlpine blends celebrities and invented characters in a similar nostalgic mix, but his approach is more magical than Doctorow's. Unfortunately out of print, this book deserves a new edition.


Dense and verbally tricky, this novel connects violence, sex, mutual assured destruction, and retaliation for injuries in a postmodern moral fable. Too pathologically and graphically violent to succeed as entertainment, it is nevertheless a skillful mix of literary techniques.


Heavy and thick symbolic novel that just avoids congealing altogether. It is, as one should remember, a first novel by an author who went on to greatness. The Natural has had a tremendous impact on later baseball fiction, and remains a true archetype of the genre. Filmed in 1984.

Criticism: Candelaria, Dodge, McGimpsey, O'Connor, Petty, Schiavone, Sullivan, Turner, Vosevich, Wasserman, Westbrook.


Defies the usual formula by having its central team become truly awful.


Moderately funny life's-losers novel; similar in setting and theme to Lorenz's Guys Like Us, but lacks that novel's edge and abandon.


The kidnapped-cousin subplot keeps one's attention, but the novel drags on after it is sewn up, and ends with spasms of melodrama and a truly bad pastiche of Molly Bloom's soliloquy from Ulysses.


Readable magical-realist fare.


Dreadfully unfunny Cold War comedy, possibly a trial balloon for a movie treatment that Hollywood was too smart in the long run to buy.



A mix of wacky character business and overly fraught marital trouble somewhat detracts from the central theme, which is American male midlife wish-fulfillment in its purest form.


And does so. Sporadically interesting local-color farce that hits about .150 in its attempts at humor and pathos. See my review at lection.