Like the inner dust jacket, which promised “an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love,” the cover blurbs stopped well short of attributing profundity to the book. Last September, Chad Harbach’s campus-baseball novel, The Art of Fielding, released in paperback this month, was published to great fanfare, but after the Franzen-Tolstoy comparisons of 2010, the praise seemed subdued, almost credible. They succumb to the loudest promotional campaign every year only because they recognize the recurring need for an “it” novel, something everyone can agree to read at about the same time. It would be wrong to think them gullible. If they like it, so much the better, but a sense of connection to their peers is what they’re really after. M ost people’s interest in contemporary “literary” fiction, if they have any interest at all, is a matter of wanting to read the latest Big Novel while it’s still being talked about.
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