“Fielder’s Choice” Author: J. Mark Hart
Publisher: TradeWorks Publishing
Pages: 460
Price: $12.95
“Fielder’s Choice,” the debut novel of Birmingham attorney J. Mark Hart, is the coming of age story of one specific young man, high school baseball player Brad Williams, in the spring of 1969, but also the story of his family, the community, West Lake, in Birmingham and, in a larger sense, the story of the crisis that swirled around America in 1969, in Alabama and everywhere. Brad is in his senior year and, as the title suggests, is faced with a lot of important decisions.
His high school has just been integrated and Brad has been replaced at shortstop by Robbie, a talented black athlete, and the only African American on the team. Brad needs a scholarship to be the first in his family to get to college and to escape a life in the mills, but, now playing second base, he does not shine so brightly. The bigots on the team want to drive Robbie off.
How much grace can Brad muster? For treating Robbie with respect, Brad is assaulted by the school bully, Bubba, and bullying in 1969 was done with fists, not snide remarks on the internet.
Brad’s best friend, B.J., the centerfielder, has a girlfriend, “Pages,” who is “late.” Now there’s a timeless high school crisis not particularly dependent on current events.
There is another newcomer to the high school, Paxton Summers, a long-haired Yankee from Connecticut who drives a VW, has joined the local counterculture and introduces Brad to the Purple Mushroom head shop, incense, bell bottoms, Beat poetry, especially Ginsburg’s” Howl,” books like “Slaughterhouse Five,” Jimi Hendrix, folk music and a hippie chick, Michelle.
A receptive fellow, Brad is altogether entranced.
Susie Parker, Brad’s very pretty, conventional, cheerleader, First Baptist girlfriend is distressed by all this unusual behavior. There will be trouble.
Those were tumultuous times.
Brad begins to consider ideas never before dreamed of. Is the “conflict” in Vietnam legitimate? If he draws a low number in the draft lottery, should he serve, or flee? Should Brad, like Paxton, apply for Conscientious Objector status? Is he actually against all wars? Brad confesses to the reader, “It wouldn’t bother me to mow down the enemy with a machine gun….” So, I guess not.
The anti-war organizers meet at the Universal Congregation Church, and older readers may recognize some now-retired UAB English faculty.
Brad’s grandmother is old and beginning to suffer from dementia. The family must sell her house but it’s not simple. If they advertise the house, a black family might offer to buy. If that happens, the whites in stable and pleasant blue-collar West Lake will hate the Williamses and abandon the neighborhood in terror. If they sell to a white family, ignoring black offers, the Williamses could be sued under the new Fair Housing Act.
Running throughout the novel is the baseball season. The team has a shot at the state championship. Brad’s straight and ambitious coach, however, is apoplectic about his players having long hair, never mind distractions like social causes or demonstrating against an unjust war.
“Fielder’s Choice” is the story of Brad’s season of awakening, beginning with the first day of baseball practice and ending with high school graduation. Told by Brad in adulthood, it is modelled, one guesses, on “The Great Gatsby.” Whereas Nick Carraway reminds the reader by saying “reading over what I have written so far…,” Brad says things like “I can’t believe I’m even telling any of this. I can hardly write these words.”
These characters are sketched in, but not deeply. This is a novel of “types” in a particular cultural moment, not a psychological drama. Hart’s prose is adequate, but “Fielder’s Choice,” forgivably, lacks the poetry of “The Great Gatsby.” One must note, however, that Fitzgerald told his very complex tale in 182 pages, not Hart’s 460.
This review was originally broadcast on Alabama Public Radio. Don Noble is host of the Alabama Public Television literary interview show “Bookmark” and the editor of “A State of Laughter: Comic Fiction from Alabama.”
