Book Review: Brittle Innings

Michael Bishop
1994
Awards: Locus (Fantasy)
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

Using a somewhat Lovecraftian scheme, Brittle Innings tells a story within a story within a story. It is the story of a man (a sports reporter) telling us the story of another man (a former pro baseball player) telling him the story of yet a third man (another former pro baseball player…who has a terrible secret).

In the first (and most literally and figuratively parenthetical) of these stories, sports writer Gabe Stewart tracks down Danny Boles, a reclusive but brilliant scout for the Atlanta Braves, to write his life story. Boles agrees to be interviewed, but says he will only talk about his one and only year as a player in the minor leagues. Stewart is skeptical, but says okay.

For most of the rest of the book, Boles then tells the story of his year as a shortstop with the Highbridge Hellbenders, a farm team for the Philadelphia Phillies, in 1943. As he does so, he is able to get out the real story he wants to the world to know: the story of his former friend and teammate, Hank Clerval.

Boles’ own story is about baseball in the dirt-poor, racist and definitely not integrated American South during World War II, and it is the one that (unfortunately) takes up the vast majority of the book. Clerval’s story is much more unique and much more riveting, and (unfortunately) gets much less time. The two stories are told in almost completely separate parallel narratives for quite a while, barely touching until relatively late in the book.

In 1943, Boles is a big-eared, stammering, 17-year-old kid from a farm town in Oklahoma. He is recruited by the Phillies to play shortstop for the Hellbenders, a minor league team in Georgia that is filling out its ranks with high school students and hobbling has-beens now that all able-bodied male adults have gone off to the war.

Boles’ life is a miserable one most of the time, starting with him being raped by a G.I. on the train to Georgia, an incident which renders him completely mute for months afterwards. Once he makes it to Highbridge, Boles is bullied by most of his new teammates as well, who saddle him with the lovely nickname “Dumbo” because of his big ears and because of his muteness. It doesn’t make his social life any easier that he is a scrappy, speedy, base-stealing, great-fielding, good-hitting player who very quickly boots the existing shortstop out of a job.

One of the few players to treat Boles with civility is his roommate, 7-foot-tall infielder Hank “Jumbo” Clerval. Clerval is intimidatingly enormous and has a strangely misshapen body, but is also well-mannered and well-spoken (albeit in an oddly antique way). The fans are afraid of his appearance, but revere him as a local hero because of his home-run hitting power and his vacuum-cleaner-like fielding at first base.

We track the team’s slogging progress over the summer of 1943 as they rise (largely with Boles’ and Clerval’s play) from the basement to the top of the standings. Boles suffers one personal indignity after another off the field, only gradually proving himself to his teammates, the manager, and the fans. The daily sadness of his story is, frankly, pretty painful to get through most of the time.

Meanwhile, as Boles bonds increasingly with Clerval, he starts to notice strange things about him—like that he reads dozens of library books a week, consuming them like a house afire. And that he keeps all the retired game balls, peeling the leather covers off of them and keeping the stripped leathers in a box by his bed. And that the manager occasionally lets Jumbo use his own personal car, during a time of severe wartime gas rationing, to drive to Alabama, and that he takes the baseball covers with him when he goes, and comes back without them. And Boles also witnesses an odd incident where Jumbo is accidentally zapped when the electric lights are turned on before a night game at an away ballpark—but instead of killing him, the shock actually appears to give Jumbo a jolt of new energy.

About halfway through Boles’ agonizingly gritty narrative, the story finally starts to take on some real speed and interest when Boles finds Clerval’s diaries. The contents of the diaries are the third (innermost?) story line in the book, which is by far the most magnetic. Written in Jumbo’s antiquated voice, they reveal that Jumbo has had a very interesting past—a globe-spanning life, from Europe to the Arctic to America—stretching back more decades than would seem possible.

And Boles starts to realize why Clerval has such a misshapen—almost, one might say, patched-together-looking—body; and why his speech seems to come out of a much earlier era; and why electrical shocks seem to revitalize him instead of kill him; and Boles starts to realize that the unassuming, lonely Jumbo might, just might, be the real-life basis for one of the most famous monster stories of all time.

Bishop has done an impressive job of writing Boles’ and Clerval’s intertwining stories in utterly different and yet totally authentic and internally consistent voices. Boles’ writing is rural Oklahoma vernacular, and makes copious use of 1940s-era slang and colorful similes, metaphors, and adjectives. For example:

“A couple of players sniggered. Guys with sense, though, hung on bent tenterhooks and bided their time.” 

“They’d pull eight-hour second shifts and get back to their homes or to McKissic house around midnight, limp as boiled asparagus and almost as pale.” 

“We revved for revenge in the so-called nightcap and shellacked them three to zip in about ninety minutes. We got some nutritious shuteye that night and ambushed the poor saps again on Sunday.” 

Jumbo’s writing, on the other hand, uses the style, vocabulary, and even attitude of an exceedingly well-read and diligently self-educated 19th century gentleman. For example:

“I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.”

“Even had my face shone as comely as Apollo’s, my great size would always speak to the timid or the wary my undeniable potential for inflicting ruin.”

“Turning, he threw the ball in a low arc to a teammate at one congested corner of the ‘diamond.’ This disciplined heave and its skilled reception by a teammate excited the local enthusiasts to even louder approbation.” 

This double-voiced narrative is a true triumph of writing, and Bishop deserves serious kudos for it. The really disappointing thing about this book, though, is that it takes so long to get to its delicious meaty core. Far too much of it is focused on Boles' heartbreaking pursuit of an ultimately hopeless baseball career, and is filled with unrelenting cruelty. It didn't help that I didn’t really like Boles, or his teammates, or the setting, or the sweaty heat, or the idiotic and angry and defensive supporting characters. The hunt for the championship of the Highbenders' little minor league did wake me up a bit, but it wasn’t until a couple hundred pages or so had gone by that Clerval’s story really opened up and things got more exciting.

Because Jumbo’s diary entries are the absolute jewel of this book. They are suspenseful and engrossing, and he comes across as an intelligent, sympathetic, appealing character (or creature) struggling to get by in a world that rejects him. It’s a captivating misunderstood-monster story straight out of the Romantic era. It’s just too bad that Boles’ story sinks it, all but burying it in depressing, dragging peripheral context.