“I’ve only read a few baseball novels in the past twenty years, and those didn’t make much of an impression. I love Philip Roth, for instance, and have devoured fifteen or more of his books—but I couldn’t get through The Great American Novel. So there was no tradition of the baseball novel that I felt myself working in. I think I wanted to avoid writing a “baseball book” in the same way that a novelist writing about sex wants to avoid writing pornography. If the sex is the point, then it’s porn. And if the outcome of a baseball game is the point, then it’s baseball porn.”

Paris Review – Chad Harbach on ‘The Art of Fielding’

Notes

  1. mightyflynn reblogged this from markcoatney
  2. choire said: Huh. There’s something confusing in there that points to the very odd way he writes about sex….
  3. markcoatney posted this