"The Art of Fielding"

[fiefoe]

It gradually occurred to me that Chad Harbach didn't write a baseball novel so much as a nicely-done college soap opera. (Hence I have little problem with the unnecessary and unconvincing love triangle among the young ones.) This is much more enjoyable than "The Marriage Plot", as the author seems to like his own characters that much more.

• that blank look... Expressionless, expresses God.
• 213. Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does.
• For him monogamy was.. a glamorous, possibly unattainable goal.
• Before he'd arrived, life at Westish had seemed heroic and grand, grave and essential, like Mike Schwartz.
• This was a real college, an enlightened place - you could get in trouble for hating people here.
• Coach Cox could afford to treat (Owen) as an equal. Much the same way.. that a priest appreciates his lone agnostic parishioner, the one who doesn't want to be saved but keeps showing up for the stained glass and the singing.
• When he could run five seven-minute miles, Schwartz made him do it on the sand.
• feel myself unfolding within myself
• That sentence could contain anything anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight's mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the books' very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.
• The plastic caps of Gatorade bottles, their spiny underedges like tiny crowns of thorns.
• feeling deliciously older than old, giddy with my own seriousness / wielding his own heat
• trying to gather as many molecules as possible under the name Henry Skrimshander
• 'One of the cures the doctors prescribed for tuberculosis back then was 'jolting'. Which meant going for high-speed carriage rides on deeply rutted roads. Months, weeks before she died. Coughing blood all the way."
• (2) don't get your hair cut the day before a game. Haircuts threw off  a ballplayer's equilibrium, because they subtly altered the weight and aerodynamicity of his head.

litotes