I hate baseball. Even with liberal helpings of beer and good company, I cant sit through more than a couple of innings without pining for hardwood with squeaking sneakers, or pads cracking, or a good ol fashioned foot race. However, I understand its niche in the American culture and in the hearts of so many of us. That must be the reason I am such a sucker for baseball novels and movies. A Flatland Fable by Joe Coomer is truly about the nuances of baseball as cultural diety and moral backdrop.Horgan is a 40 year old fireman in the smallest and flattest of small, flat towns. In the course of a day he learns his place in the grand scheme of things. He has been waiting for life to happen and, finally, it does. (Or has it been happening all along?) Questions are answered concerning his dying father, his lost mother, his uninsemenated wife and the nearly-mediocre baseball team he coaches.
The spiritual and emotional lift I experienced when first reading this novel left me baffled. This short novel compressed the thoughts of a characters lifetime into a single day and a couple of hundred pages. To experience something with the kind of impact this provided , Ive had to read many more pages to appreciate the characters plight. A Flatland Fable is terse, like a poem, short and jammed with meaning.
Joe Coomers other early works--The Decatur Road, Kentucky Love, and The Loop-- evoke similar emotional responses to a tale of everyday life, while stirring philosophical musings.
Sometimes the story unfolds in a Dickensian fashion with secrets being revealed and new questions arising as the old ones are answered. That is, however, only a vehicle for the larger purpose of animating the main character who is so much like most of us that the reader will adore him for the undiscipined, lifeless Everyman that he is. Hes George Baily without the idealism, Andy Taylor without the Wisdom, Huckleberry Finn, old and burdened with pseudo-responsibilities.
Do not pass this monumentally great read even if the undercurrent of an anticipated baseball game makes you squeamish.
