Chad Harbach's debut novel The Art of Fielding begins at a no-name summer baseball tournament somewhere in the Midwest. We see the scene through the eyes of Mike Schwartz, a catcher from Chicago who's just finished his first year of college at a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin. His team has just demolished a team from South Dakota, including a scrawny shortstop who looked to be 14, though he's actually just finished his senior year of high school. Mike Schwartz doesn't think much of the kid during the game--he strikes out on three high fastballs, including the last one that Schwartzy tells him is coming "Since you can't hit it anyway." Mike dismisses him, but then after the game--the fifth in three days of extreme heat--he sees the kid go out to take fielding practice with his coach and first basemen. The kid, whose name is Henry Skrimshander, has nothing left to play for, since he's graduated from high school and won't be playing college baseball, but there he is. And this is what Schwartzy sees: 
 The coach hit balls harder and farther afield--up the middle, deep in the hole. The kid tracked them down. Several times Schwartz felt sure he would need to slide or dive, or that the ball was flat-out unreachable, but he got to each one with a beat to spare. He didn't seem to move faster than any decent shortstop would, and yet he arrived instantly, impeccably, as if he had some foreknowledge of where the ball was headed. Or as if time had slowed down for him alone. 
 After each ball, he dropped back into his feline crouch, the fingertips of his small glove scraping the cooked earth. He barehanded a slow roller and fired to first on a dead run. He leaped high to snag a tailing line drive. Sweat poured down his cheeks as he sliced through the soup-thick air. Even at full speed his face looked bland, almost bored, like that of a virtuoso practicing scales. 
 ... 
 All his life Schwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent, some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that he'd seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn't let it walk away. 
 Mike convinces Henry to come to Westish College and its down-at-the-heels baseball program. He mentors Henry in the athletic training and hitting skills he'll need to supplement his gifted fielding, and in the process Henry becomes a legitimate major league prospect by his junior year at the Division III liberal arts college. 
 Henry and Mike are the central figures of the novel, but there are other characters central to the novel's development. There's Owen Dunne, Henry's freshperson roommate, who is Henry's first friend and joins the baseball team despite a distinct lack of interest in or aptitude for baseball (perhaps a mark of how bad the team is: he makes it). There's the college president, Guert Affenlight, who loves the college deeply[spoiler]--and comes to love Owen Dunne perhaps more.[/spoiler] There's Affenlight's daughter Pella, who returns home after dropping out of high school her senior year to run away with a 30-year-old married man, now looking to pick up the pieces of her life. [spoiler]She and Mike Schwartz end up falling for each other. [/spoiler]. 
 Central to the novel is an incident during Henry's junior year (this could be construed as a spoiler, but it's referred to in pretty much every review you'll read, and I trust won't hurt to know--but you've been warned), just as he is about to tie the career NCAA record for most games without a fielding error, when an errant throw misses the first baseman and drills his friend Owen Dunne, giving him a concussion and breaking his cheek. The game ends up being called later that inning, so the error doesn't go on Henry's stats and he ties the record, but it seems to be all downhill from there for Henry, who has "Steve Sax Syndrome," an inability to make routine throws, as he freezes us any time he has time to think about his throw. 
 There's a sense in which each of the characters has a version of this breakdown: [spoiler]Schwartz is rejected from all the prestigious law schools he applied to, and he and Pella cannot make their relationship work, while Pella is also struggling to manage the disintegration of her marriage and her difficult relationship with her father. Meanwhile, Guert Affenlight has falled in love with a student--and a male student at that, as Owen also falls for this older man (actually, Owen doesn't really fit the breakdown paradigm--he's doing pretty well for himself. [/spoiler] 
 In the end, there are no easy answers, either on the field or off the field. Harbach flirts with some of the sports story cliches, but is ultimately too good of a writer--and this is too good a book--to offer pat answers. 
 There were a lot of things I loved about this novel. I loved its setting, as it reminded me strongly of my own years at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. And not surprising for a novel set at a liberal arts college, there are a lot of literary allusions. The big one is to Herman Melville. Westish, it seems, was visited by Melville late in life, where he gave a quickly-forgotten speech that was found in the archives by Affenlight back in his own student days at Westish--as a consequence, the school changed its mascot to the Harpooners, erected a statue of Melville, and now does a brisk trade in Melville-related kitsch. But the literary allusions don't stop there. 
 I was also taken by Harbach's eye for the telling details and his ability to succinctly capture the truth of something, from the details of a young man learning to lift weights and consume all the "right" body-building products to the truths of the human condition. He writes with humor and compassion and skill. 
 Additionally: I listened to the audio production of the novel and quite enjoyed it. Great work by Holter Graham performing it and to Hachette Audio in the production.