You Are Hereby Invited To Join The Universal Baseball Association

There was a time, during a personal zenith of certitude and obnoxiousness that fits perfectly over my last years of college, when I was sure I knew what a real novel was, and what it was for. As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews of, novels were about when you were a man in an unhappy marriage. Sometimes you were English and sometimes you were a college professor and sometimes you worked in The Business Industry, but that was about the size of things as far as I could tell.

Some of these books, which I read and at some level enjoyed and admired very much, doubtless hold up; I am also surely being a little rude or just unfair to your Saul Bellow types, who were writing more about how it feels or what it means to be a man in an unhappy marriage. But even when that was what I understood this work to be, and what I wanted to do with my life, there was something that felt confining about it. This was not just because I had not yet had many or any of the experiences that these books lavished over and raged against, although I'm sure that didn't help. But the idea that this was all there was—all that unhappy grown-up stuff, over and over, unfolding in spaces I mostly recognized from other such stories—didn't feel right to me.

To be clear, that in no way meant that I'd given up on the idea of pacing anxiously through those very same halls for the rest of my life; I didn't give up on being a great American novelist until I'd been out of school for nearly a decade, although what first felt like a personal identity crisis quickly declined into something much more like relief. But I think it explains, in retrospect, why the books I read that kicked holes in those familiar walls or just declined to make the gestures I'd come to expect felt so thrilling and vital to me. I had been so busy and so serious in examining the fixtures and finishes and clever design elements in those rooms that I hadn't realized how claustrophobic it felt in there, and how thin that recycled air had become.