THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9407220494
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY REID MAKI
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
DIAMOND
Baseball Writings of Mark Harris
MARK HARRIS
Donald I. Fine. 289 pp. $21.95.
THE TALE MAKER
MARK HARRIS
Donald I. Fine. 215 pp. $21.
DIAMOND IS A curious hodgepodge of Mark Harris' baseball writings. It contains the first chapter of his poignant baseball classic, Bang the Drum Slowly, along with its screenplay, an essay about writing the adaptation, another comparing the acting styles and personalities of Robert De Niro and Michael Moriarty (two of the film's stars), and nearly 20 baseball pieces that he has written over 35 years.
Those essays range far and wide both in quality and content from an interesting feature about then minor-leaguer Dick Stuart, who had hit 66 homers in one season - ``I'd of hit 90 if the pitching was better,'' Stuart quipped - to a pedestrian look at a San Francisco Giants game through the vantage points of the city's diverse neighborhoods.
Several essays are so short - only four to five pages long - that they leave the reader feeling cheated. Most tend to focus exclusively on their subjects - the Rose-Giamatti controversy, Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak, the phenom that didn't make it - without straying into the game's rich fields of anecdotage and statistics. Harris confesses that he no longer follows the sport, and the reader sometimes senses his lack of mastery.
Harris is, however, a gifted writer who conveys a sense of the game, its life lessons and its enduring value. His prose is spare, Hemingwayesque, and occasionally evocative: ``I became a fan of baseball because I had once glimpsed the green expanse of serenity. . . '' But it is the screenplay and first chapter of the novel, Bang the Drum Slowly, that take your breath away with their simple, raw power; they're reason enough to seek out Diamond, whether you're a season ticket holder or a casual fan.
Released simultaneously with Diamond is Harris' new academic novel, The Tale Maker. It's the story of Rimrose and Kakapick, two opposites who share a freshman dorm and whose lives intersect in unexpected ways. Rimrose is a university golden boy, well-liked, and hard-working. He's the editor of the college newspaper and eventually a successful, if financially struggling, writer of short stories. Kakapick is the black-toothed, black-hearted pariah of the college. He has no interest in reading or understanding books but has a megalomaniacal dream of reducing all of world literature down to a reading list of ``89 or 96'' worthwhile titles.
Eventually Kakapick transmogrifies this idea into an absurd statistical method for rating the worthiness of writers and parlays it into the chairmanship of a university English department. Then, for selfish reasons, he rescues Rimrose from financial and creative bankruptcy with a cushy professorship.
In a finer honed academic satire, this all might have served as a cogent comment on colleges' sacrifice of teaching in the pursuit of a prestigious faculty. But Harris, a university professor himself, is no Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe, and the novel, although it comes close occasionally, never reaches the necessary level of insanity. Ultimately, Rimrose's life as a writer is a prosaic one. Its telling rarely engages, and by the time Rimrose and Kakapick have their final academic showdown, you don't care what happens to either of them. MEMO: Reid Maki is a free-lance writer and a long-suffering Boston Red Sox
fan. He lives in Annapolis, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Mark Harris' ``Diamond'' is being released along with his new novel,
``The Tale Maker.''
by CNB