Batting in the Dark
ROTHENBERG, RANDALL
Batting In the Dark_ Incandescence By Craig Nova Harper & Row. 312 pp. $9.95. Reviewed by Randall Rothenberg Craig Nova's new novel has a striking profusion of tantalizing baseball...
...A big crime," says Ari, "and they will come to me...
...When, at the end of the book, Stargell receives a letter from him saying, "big crime wave sweeps Athens, ha...
...Nova's characters do not grow in the course of the story...
...One searches in vain, however, for the baseball metaphors these names promise...
...In a scene of that play, a devout Catholic's son acts out the tragicomic incident in his life that has warped him, leading him to a murder attempt on the Pope...
...The author has merely strung together a series of throwaway vignettes—apparently believing them to be relevant, funny and poignant—in the hope that their very novelty will justify their creation...
...Finally, the book has no significant climax...
...after all, Stargell is here tapping the sum of his intellectual and emotional energy in a way he had not since his days at the Tank...
...After considering pogo sticks, he settles on burglar alarms...
...they stand still, reveling (as does the author) in their own quirkiness...
...Unfortunately, Nova's portrayal of Stargell's monkeyshines accomplishes nothing near this...
...he senselessly maims them as well, chopping off the legs of one, blinding another...
...In the future, Craig Nova should try to come to terms with his incandescent ideas before asking us to do so...
...Ari, for instance, has come to America to find his "product," something he can market in Greece and make a killing on...
...No matter that the demand for burglar alarms in Greece is nonexistent...
...Take Stargell: Having lost his job at "The Think Tank" (either for playing the horses with the computer, or for wasting time trying to extract oil from moths—we never really know), he is unable to move himself to find new employment...
...Although the absence of growth in a character is itself a cause for pity or sadness, in the case of this novel it merely signifies the author's failure to pick up where his literary devices leave off...
...Moreover, Nova seems to be trying to achieve in this section something similar to what John Guare achieved in The House of Blue Leaves...
...The whore with the blue wig, the loan shark's Chopin-loving enforcer, the incredible output of The Think Tank are all similarly lacking in comedic impact...
...He is a former Greek Army officer who shoots off guns in taxis, and habitually fingers his bald spot ringed by dyed red hair...
...The scene where Stargell rouses himself to audition for the job of gorilla at an amusement park should be the cathartic height of the novel...
...not even a giggle is aroused...
...As for the story itself—well, there isn't much of that either...
...Then there is her father, Ari...
...The son's frantic role-playing, complete with feats of athletic prowess, tells you a great deal about the character and his motivations...
...Their use is, in fact, nothing but an idle literary device that serves no larger purpose—not surprising, really, since there is no larger purpose, not to mention theme, discernible in Incandescence...
...His wife, Enid, has a Howard Hughesian antipathy toward germs that prevents her from sleeping with him and drives her to rearrange furniture in the middle of the night...
...Reviewed by Randall Rothenberg Craig Nova's new novel has a striking profusion of tantalizing baseball references: The narrator's name is Star-gell, and he is joined by a host of tangential characters called Munson, Ca-rew, Lee MacPhail, The Georgia Peach, Concepcion, and Al Hrabosky...
...Yet not only does Nova give his characters unexplained eccentricities...
Vol. 62 • April 1979 • No. 9
