It Looked Like Forever by Mark Harris

This is the fourth, the strangest, and the least successful of the four novels Mark Harris wrote featuring Henry W. Wiggen, the left-handed catcher for the New York Mammoths. First introduced in The Southpaw, we meet Wiggen as a nineteen year-old starting his career in the minors, and his stand-out rookie year, 1952, with the Mammoths. In the second novel, Bang the Drum Slowly, Wiggen supports a catcher on the team, Bruce Pearson, as Bruce receives a cancer diagnosis and spends a final year, 1955, playing ball before dying. That novel is often named as the best baseball novel of all time. It is very good, but The Southpaw is equally good and more about baseball, where the main interest of Bang the Drum Slowly is watching the young athletes struggle to comprehend and accept mortality.

The third of the four: A Ticket for a Seamstitch, started life as a short story that Harris expanded into a short novel after the story was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it. Knopf published it as a book in 1957. It still reads like a short story. An unnamed female fan writes a letter to Wiggen asking that he buy her a ticket for the July 4, 1956 game in New York as she plans to travel across country to see him play. Wiggen isn’t much interested, but his romantically inclined roommate, Piney Woods, is charmed. The novel tracks the woman’s cross-country trip and the fantasy that Piney Woods conjures before actually meeting her.

That novel, unlike the first two which covered a full baseball season, ends after the July 4 double-header. This novel, too, the fourth, begins as they all do in the winter, but ends halfway through the season. This time it’s the 1970 baseball season. All four novels are presented as though Wiggen himself is writing the story during the off-season following the year he writes about. Starting with the second novel his teammates give him the nick name “author.” Throughout the four novels he maintains his vernacular, unlearned writing style, simple sentences and occasional mis-used words.

It Looked Like Forever, chronicles Wiggen’s final year in baseball. Published in 1979, it comes long after the other three novels. The setting is 1971. In 1970 he still played with the Mammoths, his star rapidly burning out. In January of 1971, the beginning of the novel, Wiggen learns that he’s been released from the team, and simultaneously learns that the manager’s job, recently become available as the previous manager, Dutch Schnell, died on the golf course, has been given to someone else. Wiggen, feeling betrayed at what he thought was a future meant for him, age 39, refuses to believe that his ball-playing days are over. He knows he doesn’t have his fastball any more, nor the stamina and speed of a young man, but he thinks he’s good for a couple of innings, maybe someone will want him as a relief pitcher. The novel, then, is Wiggen’s attempts to hold on to his youth and find a place to play the game he loves.

He starts in Japan where an exhibition team is eager to have him, but he soon discovers the promoter’s rosy picture of the town where he’ll be playing doesn’t match the reality. He’s extended an offer to work as a pitching coach for the Washington D.C. team, but Wiggen isn’t interested in coaching; he wants to pitch, and after meeting him, the Washington manager isn’t sure he wants to work with Wiggen anyway. Neither is Wiggen attracted to the opportunity a couple of friends want to involve him in to work as an announcer for a television show, Friday Night Baseball. He’s doesn’t want to watch and talk baseball; he wants to play. The most likely opening for him is in California where an old friend is managing a team who thinks that Wiggen’s potential as a relief pitcher might be just what they need to win a pennant. But the team owner wants to hold out until the mid-season trading deadline to see if maybe he can come up with something better.

So Wiggen explores all these opportunities. In the meantime, the novel explores the ramifications of any man aging out of their youth, facing health issues, wondering what he’ll do when he can no longer do the thing he loved. In the earlier novels, Wiggen married and had a daughter. He’s still married now, with four daughters. The youngest, Hillary, is about ten years old and a terror who has learned how to manipulate Wiggen into getting what she wants by throwing screaming fits. She’s a major character in the novel and majorly annoying. Wiggen learns he has an enlarged prostate during his trip to Japan and adjusts to that new reality. (He always spells it “prostrate”.) Throughout the novel he enjoys flirty relationships with multiple women attracted to him while remaining technically faithful to his wife, which was a relief to me, having admired his wife, Holly, in the earlier novels. There’s a Dr. Schiff, Hilary’s psychiatrist. There’s Suzanne Winograd, a tennis pro who is one of the trio of announcers with Wiggen for Friday Night Baseball. There’s Marva Sprat, the wife of Wiggen’s old friend who’s trying to get him the pitching job in California. And there’s Wiggen’s attorney and financial advisor, an older woman named Barbara.

And there’s a lot of weirdness and side stories that felt like padding to me. It’s a rather long novel and I confess to getting rather bored about three quarters of the way through. There’s a bit about a woman from Iowa who wants to enroll Wiggen in a cryogenic scheme called “Life After.” There’s a small cit park in Wiggen’s town of Perkinsville, which the town gave him as a honor but now wants to take back. There’s a reference to an earlier episode where apparently Wiggen’s eldest daughter had been on a hijacked plane during a school trip and Wiggen had to negotiate with the hijackers from the control booth at the airport. Is it supposed to be a comment on mortality and purpose? Maybe? Is it supposed to be comedic? I didn’t find it so. The prostate trouble, the female trouble, the middle-aged angst, puts this novel in the world of Philip Roth. I liked it but it’s clearly the weakest of the four. We’ve traded the fun of a young man literally at the top of his game, for a character who, without his game, isn’t really all that special.

Harris had quite a career. Besides numerous novels, of which Bang the Drum Slowly is the best known, he also wrote biographies, including one of Saul Bellow, several autobiographical works, edited the poems of Vachel Lindsay and the journals of James Boswell. He also taught throughout his career, with a significant early stretch at San Francisco State College, and a late stretch at Arizona State University, with several shorter gigs in between including a few years at California Institute of The Arts a decade before I attended the school. I wish I had known him. He died in 2007.