The Unbearable Lightness of Betting

For Part One of my interview, over on SBNation, click here and for Part Two, click here.

Many have speculated that you named your character Owen after the title character from John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. But I’m guessing that would have been too on the nose for you. Am I right or am I crazy?

It’s a total coincidence, and, in fact, if I had ever read A Prayer For Owen Meany when I started the novel, I probably wouldn’t have named him Owen. I think Owen just came up as a name for the character out of the blue. And at some point during the ten years I worked on the book, farther down the line, that I found out A Prayer For Owen Meany begins the way it does and I didn’t question it too much. Then a lot of people have also compared my prose and general style to John Irving, which came as a surprise to me because I had never read John Irving until recently.

Talk to me about the role that Moby Dick played in the writing of The Art of Fielding? Did you look at it as a model in any way?

It’s not a shadow in any type of plot way, the way that some novels are. For one thing, it was just fun to play around with. The conceit that there is this school that’s not on the ocean but is on Lake Michigan and they have adopted Melville and all of this Melvellian imagery to their school. There is a fair amount of dramatic correspondence and I think that felt natural for this book because when I started thinking about what a baseball team is and does, it’s this group of guys who spend an awful lot of time in close quarters, guys who have a certain amount in common but in other ways are just sort of thrust together, and they have to spend an inordinate amount of time together in pursuit of a fairly esoteric goal. And that describes the whale ship of Moby Dick pretty perfectly. My book is about the way that guys relate to each other, in terms of affection and competition and antagonism, I think I was looking to Moby Dick as a model in that respect.

Talk to me about the role that sports plays in our modern culture.

Sports are so central to our culture that it becomes hard to describe the role they play. And while there’s an awful lot of sports writing, whether in novels or in essays, I think there’s not that much writing that tries to think through, in a serious way, what that role is. Right there in the title of my book, you can see the way that I think of sports, as a form of art. And as professional sports have gotten so much more popular over the past few decades I feel that in a certain way, they’ve usurped a certain cultural role that used to be for other arts, which is not entirely healthy. I wish that playwrights and opera singers and poets were as famous and prominent and well-respected as athletes are.

It seems to me there is a juxtaposition in the novel between the modernist/postmodernist ideas and themes you’re working with, but then you also have a central plot that would have been very much at home in a traditional/romantic novel. Was that a conscious decision you made?

I don’t think you can or should have any thoughts like that when you’re actually writing a novel. But I’m steeped as a reader in both the 19th century novel and the novels of modernism and postmodernism. And whenever I sit down to write, I’m doing so having ingested those. Moby Dick is an interesting novel to discuss in this regard. You can make a strong case that Moby Dick, although it was written in 1851 is a really modernist/postmodernist novel. It’ really playful and exuberant and formally strange and very much concerned with what replaces religion or old codes that were supposedly what’s at the center of people’s lives.

At a certain point in the process I realized that what I was writing was a modern 19th century novel, if that makes any sense. In some ways, our lives are very, very different from the 19th century, and our works of fiction are very, very different. On the other hand, things don’t change that quickly, and I think we retain an awful lot of the same ideas about human nature that people had in the 1850s, but then we’ve been through 160 years of history and literary history in between so we bring something different to it.

You offer a beautiful paragraph in the book describing the human condition, and the ostensibly contradictory role that sports and art both play in it. These are activities that are seemingly pointless but in the end offer nothing short of the possibility of discovering the meaning of life. Talk to me more about that paradox.

It’s tricky stuff to talk about, and it’s tricky as a writer or artist sometimes to justify what you do. We’re very accustomed as a society to engage everything in terms of its overall profitability, and we tend to boil everything down to a small number of possible values. But, of course, that’s incredibly narrow and cuts off all sorts of things that have value in the world. I see something like baseball or writing in the same way in that part of the point of what you’re doing is that there is no point. And you can derive a lot of meaning from those activities that isn’t economic meaning. Of course, this gets very complicated because the best baseball players play for money and the best writers write for money. But the point of baseball and the point of novels are both elusive, and the feelings and meanings are elusive and hard to describe. It’s hard enough to put words to them, much less a dollar sign.

Isn’t part of the point self-expression?

Yes, though I worry about that term because there are all sorts of uninteresting forms of self-expression. But for Henry on the field, the way that he plays shortstop is his highest and best and most natural and concentrated form of self-expression.

Last question. How do you interpret the ending of the book?

I think that at the very end of the characters find themselves in very much the same place where they started, but a lot of has happened in between. There are a few simple basic, self- directed aspects of your life that you can control, and whatever else you’re going to do has to be built on that foundation.