Play Ball

THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION, INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP, by Robert Coover. 242 pages. Random House. $4.95.

The writer who tries to build a serious novel on the restricted world of baseball starts with two strikes against him; it is an ungrateful subject. If he then compounds his folly by adding religious symbolism, most readers will head for the showers.

Such literary facts of life obviously do not scare the gifted Iowa-born Robert Coover. In his second novel, he employs precisely these concepts and what's more, swings for the fences. He does not quite make it, but he deserves at least an extra-base hit for an excellent attempt.

Triple Ones. The main character--in fact the only major character--is a rootless, helpless, 56-year-old accountant named J. Henry Waugh. Alone in his apartment, he spends all his nights and weekends playing an intricate baseball game of his own invention. Eight imaginary teams of the Universal Baseball Association battle for the pennant; individual players spring to life as three dice and a collection of elaborately detailed charts decide their fate. They reach glory, enjoy fame, grow old, lose their skills, retire to sell insurance and finally die as the dice decree. Waugh records the statistics. He is God's scorekeeper, or perhaps God himself--the name J. Henry Waugh can be read as a play on the sacred Hebrew name for the Deity: Yahweh or Jahveh. He even invents standard folk poetry in praise of his veteran players:

Oh, when I die, jist bury me

With my bat and a coupla balls,

And jist tell 'em Verne struck out, boys,

If anybody calls . . .

Soon tragedy shatters Waugh's invented cosmos. He throws triple ones three times in a row, and the "Extraordinary Occurrences Chart" demands that the next batter shall die. But the next man up is Damon Rutherford, most brilliant rookie pitcher in the history of the association. Waugh loves Damon like a son, but the necessary laws that hold the cosmos together cannot be broken. Damon Rutherford dies.

The trauma is too much for Waugh. He becomes irresponsible, cheats with the dice, finagles the charts, juggles the schedule. He throws his cosmos into chaos. In the real world, he gets fired by his employer. As he drinks his troubles away, the people of the association comfort him. In the end, the players celebrate the death of Damon Rutherford with a passion-play re-enactment of the game. The cosmos no longer has any direction; the players are on their own. And there is the doomed Damon Rutherford, holding the baseball aloft, "hard and white and . . . beautiful." He says, "It's not a trial. It's not even a lesson. It's just what it is."

Doom. And what is it? Among other things, it is a humorous evocation of the characters and the ambiance that have given baseball its mythic quality. Bernard Malamud's The Natural was a strikingly effective allegory of the baseball hero as a contemporary Sir Percival who in the end is destroyed by the myth-hungerers. Coover is less morally emphatic. He does suggest that God cannot forestall man's doom, and that man can destroy himself when he relinquishes reality for illusion.

Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, dealt with the corrupting influence of religious fanaticism. Baseball is more ambitious but is flawed by the fact that Coover's fantasy characters are too detailed to stand as metaphorical figures. Perhaps it is just as well. Waugh's baseball game is so fascinating that the reader forgives everything else and wonders where he can buy the game for himself. It just might replace Monopoly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.