BookEnds

Well, I finished “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez.” It didn’t end as badly, with all the heavy psychoanalysis, as it began. But it didn’t end well. The book didn’t really tell us anything about Rodriguez, it didn’t make a hard and fast case that he is a cheater, and it didn’t tell us why he’s so hot and cold as a player.

It didn’t really tell us much of anything. But that might speak more to the subject than to the writer, and the rush to get it out might speak more to the state of the publishing industry than anything else. Reading it cost us a contributor, but hopefully our eagerness to tear it apart, honestly and critically, didn’t lose us any readers.

The holes in the book’s assessment of him as a player and a person just made me want to read more about A-Rod, and now I want to see him in action. Maybe I’ll actually catch a Yankees game this year.

Reading the book also made us realize that Selena Roberts probably lives in Westport. Sorry, Selena.

We’re ready to close the book on the ill-fated match between Roberts and A-Rod. Then it’s on to “The Nine,” the 2007 book by New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin about the Supreme Court. Just in time for the Sonia Sotormayor confirmation hearings. Stay tuned.

Elizabeth, it looks like Dave has left us. He is on vacation this week, but didn’t leave before asking me if I expected him to read and blog about A-Rod while he was gone. I told him I did not. I don’t want to read this on vacation either.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten through about half the book, to chapter 8, “The Trophy Date.” A-Rod has been traded to the Yankees after his unprecedented $252 million/10 year deal with the Texas Rangers.

Leaving aside for a moment the shadily sourced accusations of cheating as a Rangers shortstop and Jose Canseco’s conjectures (even though A-Rod’s already admitted to using steroids now, and we don’t need Canseco telling us something he doesn’t know) I have a big question for you: why is the subtitle “The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez?” So far there’s only one life.  That life has just changed over time. Maybe he’s a conflicted person, but he doesn’t seem to have multiple personalities. And I only have about 100 pages left, so I think, at most, Roberts has room to make the case for dual personalities. And even duality would be tough in 100 pages.

There were also a few spots where I felt as though I was stepping out of time and space to read Roberts actually criticizing her own book. She brings up Stuart Smalley, the Al Franken “Saturday Night Live,” I had compared her vision of A-Rod to in a previous post. She says the following at the beginning of chapter 5, “The Perfectionist:”

Alex Rodriguez was suffering from a writer’s block of sorts in forming his own baseball identity, wanting badly for his career to be a living folktale but comparatively frozen on how to start the narrative.

Oh no, Selena. Did you mean to put that in, or was that a note to someone about you writing this book?

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ABOVE: Ernest Murrell, right, of the Stamford CC, and Rahul Francois, of St. John’s CC during a friendly last year.

6/27/2009

STAMFORD – Sitting at a picnic table in Lione Park, brown bagging a tall-boy as the cricketers in their starched whites ran about the pitch, I couldn’t help but think of Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland.”

The 2008 novel is ostensibly a post-9/11 story of New York, of its citizens grappling with life in the months after the devastating terrorist attacks, but it is so much more than that. The elegant prose is so precise and crafted it is an absolute pleasure to read – a quality all too often forgotten in modern fiction.

Hans van den Broek, the novel’s narrator, is a Dutch financial analyst living in New York with his wife and young son when the attacks of 9/11 force them to move from Lower Manhattan to a residential hotel in Midtown. Unable to cope with this new life, his family returns to Europe without him and the despondent van den Broek seeks friendship and the consolation of familiarity on the cricket pitch.

It is here, on the cricket grounds of the outer boroughs, that he falls in with men from the West Indies and the Asian Subcontinent, revealing a world within New York unseen from his life on Wall Street. With men more familiar with bookmaking than the oil futures market, who suit up in brilliant white and take the field each week for the love of a game that took hold on every island, every colony, every outpost once touched by the British Empire.

Likewise, in Stamford, members of the local cricket clubs gather on the West Side for matches, putting aside national rivalries to play overs on the new synthetic-turf field. Most of the players here hail from Jamaica, Barbados and other island nations, but India, Pakistan and occasionally England, Ireland and Australia are represented. Their national origins are evidenced by the colors on the caps many of the men wear, not officially part of the uniform, yet proudly displayed. In Lione park these men keep alive traditions first formalized in the 18th century.

The world of cricket in “Netherland” is rendered in vivid detail; the slow, humid Sundays of midsummer provide a rich backdrop for the dueling plot lines which explore not only the implosion of van der Broek’s personal life but also the Gatsby-esque tale that unfolds when he befriends a Trinidadian con-man with ambitions to build a world-class cricket stadium on an abandoned airfield in Brooklyn.

Comparisons to the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic – a paragon of American fiction – are not to be taken lightly, but O’Neill’s book stands up to this praise in many ways. O’Neill, Irish by birth, ultimately comes closer to the “Great American Novel,” than most American writers could ever hope.

–CP

NOTE: “Netherland” recently won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction after being a finalist in the National Book Awards and is now out in paperback.

Elizabeth and Dave, thanks for reading the book with me! I’ll think we’re in for a really interesting discussion.

To answer your question, Elizabeth, I’m going to ‘fess up and admit that I actually am not a big sports fan. And by that I mean, I usually hate sports. I haven’t played any team sports since junior high. I haven’t watched basketball since the University of Arkansas Razorbacks won the NCAA tournament in 1994 (woo! pig! sooey!).

Which isn’t to say sports doesn’t sometimes interest me. I would have liked to see LeBron James play Kobe Bryant this year, but it wasn’t meant to be. And while baseball hasn’t interested me as a sport, baseball writing intrigues me because it can be more about the people who play than the action on the field. I had a professor once who believed that was the reason Americans liked baseball, and probably explains why I don’t; fans are devoted to the histories and personalities of their teams, and watching the game on the field allows you to take part in the story-telling. I have a friend who goes to as many Mets games as she can, no matter how badly they’re doing, because she and her dad went throughout her childhood.

There are two sports books on my to-read list in addition to the A-Rod book, however: “A Few Seconds of Panic: A 5-Foot 8-Inch, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays Football with the Pros” by Stefan Fastis, and “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game” by Michael Lewis.

Thanks, Monica and Dave, for inviting me to join the fray and kick start the book blog. Since you took me up on my suggestion to start off with Selena Robert’s book on Alex Rodriguez, I’m preparing to shoulder the blame should it somehow fail to be blog-worthy material. My hope was that, at the very least, the subject matter and writing will serve as lightening rods for other issues that matter to us as journalists and sports fans.

So I guess it’s only fitting that I begin my first post by explaining why I wanted to read this particular book in the first place. It has nothing to do with being either a Yankee or A-Rod fan. (Full disclosure: I grew up in Queen as an angst-ridden Mets fan.) My ears do, however, prick up at the scintillating gossip surrounding A-Rod. Like most people who thumb through the tabloids at the supermarket checkout line–Monica, can you tell I’m desperately in need of book club salvation?–I am curious to learn about the exact nature of A-Rod’s relationship with Madonna–did she brainwash him to the point where her videos put him in a trance? did the two really have Sabbath dinners together?

On that and any matters related to Kabbalah, I’m hoping this book settles the score once and for all.

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Starting June 22, we’ll be reading “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez” by Selena Roberts, a former New York Times sports columnist and writer for Sports Illustrated. Dave Ruden, Elizabeth Kim and I will be discussing the meat of the book, and what it means for sports and journalism. Feel free to jump in at any time!

I have to admit, the overriding reason for my participation in discussing “A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez,” is to help my colleague Monica get her blog off the ground. As a fellow blogger, I understand the importance of trying to get an audience right away and then grow it.

Truth be told, I would appear the wrong person for this project. I have lost a lot of interest in baseball over the years; the sport has become too slow and I have a difficult time focusing through an entire game. In addition, with limited discretionary time to read, I lean almost on a steady diet of fiction, mostly literate mysteries. Add in the fact that thanks to George Steinbrenner I am no longer a Yankees fan and, like many, get sick of the whole athlete-steroid debate, and one would have to wonder why Monica would want me involved and why I would accept.

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