As has been said elsewhere, Chad Harbach deserves credit for a crafting a compulsively readable novel around one of the world’s most tedious team sports. That THE ART OF FIELDING keeps the reader hooked for over 500 pages is even more impressive. In fact it is the baseball story that carries the book—Henry Skrimshander, prodigiously talented shortstop, seems destined for greatness until a sudden loss of form renders him merely human. Various subplots are threaded around Henry’s rise and fall, none of them 
particularly interesting and serving mostly as respite from all the bench-pressing, protein ‘shakes and locker room bravado. The author writes well enough and the fictional world of Westish College is vividly imagined, right down to the sporting anthem that serves as the book’s epigraph, but I could never shake the sense of a fierce intellectual (Harbach co-founded n+1 after all) repressing his instincts in the hope of knocking out a crowd-pleasing bestseller. Undoubtedly, he has succeeded. But the fragment of Emerson trivia on which the novel’s implausible and anachronistic denouement is founded feels like a last ditch attempt to impress his literary pals—an undercooked escargot concealed inside the final bite of big, greasy cheeseburger.
Ben Lerner comes at things very differently. LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION—picked up heroically by the tiny Minnesota-based Coffee House Press and now published in the UK by Granta—makes no attempt to pander to its audience, narrated as it is by a pretentious, taciturn, drug-addicted young American poet loafing around Madrid achieving 
almost nothing. Against all odds, this seemingly dreadful premise for a novel produces quite brilliant results. Adam Gordon is a mordantly hilarious hero, so searingly self-aware that no matter how severe his derision for others—an effusive and long-haired Spanish poet for example, or his fellow American tourists—the most lacerating blows are always saved for himself. Operating ‘life’s white machine’ in a permanently medicated state, remaining wilfully removed from reality by a language barrier he is reluctant (though perfectly able) to overcome, devoting himself vaguely to the ‘dead medium’ of poetry—all this is revealed, in Lerner’s masterful hands, to be less a nihilistic waste of time and more a perfect platform from which to explore the modern condition. Nothing much happens for the first three quarters of the book, but when the outside world does finally blast its way into Adam’s bubble, Lerner resists with apparent ease the melodrama to which many a lesser writer might succumb. He brings to mind Bowles, Camus, Sebald, even Proust, and unwaveringly holds his own. This is a small, serious, unfashionable book that turns out to be expansive, charming and superior to any other first novel so far this year.
Since beginning in 2003 with BLOOD MERIDIAN I have been trying not to run out of Cormac McCarthy books. With CHILD OF GOD now under my belt, only SUTTREE remains, plus whatever he publishes next (a screenplay called THE COUNSELOR 
apparently) and the two plays he wrote mid-career. His brilliance has many elements, chief of which might be his ability to render human the most unspeakably inhumane acts. The antihero of this short novel is young roamer of the Tennessee backwoods Lester Ballard, named I suspect as a nod to the late J.G., whose work (THE DROWNED WORLD in particular) seems a clear if rarely mentioned influence on McCarthy. Appearing at first to be little more than an oddity and nuisance, Ballard’s misdemeanours grow more and more heinous, his lusts more barbaric. But to the reader he remains more compelling than repulsive. The prose is as ornate and otherworldly as ever, only very rarely overwritten. As an apprentice I read him with intense concentration, eager to absorb and learn. But his secrets remain elusive—by the end of this powerful, near-perfect novel, I felt no closer to matching the master than does Ballard after the lengthy tutorial offered to him by the blacksmith to whom he takes his axe-blade for sharpening. ‘Reckon you could do it now from watchin?’ asks the smith. Ballard’s reply: ‘Do what.’
THE HONORARY CONSUL has all the ingredients of classic Graham Greene: exotic location, political strife, innocent hero tangled up in events beyond his control, a torrid 
affair and copious amounts of Catholic guilt. This fine novel, the tale of a bungled kidnapping in provincial Argentina, is deftly plotted and perfectly executed (no pun intended). Greene is so good at deploying evocative symbols to build pathos: the designer sunglasses with which Plarr seduces Clara, Charley Fortnum’s obsession with the ‘right measure’ and his beloved Land Rover (‘Fortnum’s Pride’), the chocolate éclairs Plarr’s mother substitutes for her absent husband—all of these guide the reader subtly but surely. As events creep toward their tragic and inevitable climax, an indigene sits with his shotgun outside the hut in which the Honorary Consul is being held: ‘He cleaned the crevices of the bolt with tenderness and with sensuous pleasure like a women attending to her first baby.’ For me Greene’s genius is revealed most clearly by that ‘first’, evoking as it does, even at a time of high drama, the cruel melancholies of life to which he was so attuned. This was apparently his favourite of his books, and is now one of mine.