They are the sacrifices implicit in his credo ('baseball is this country's religion'), and their season of shame, relieved only by an 11-game winning streak powered by a secret diet of synthetic Wheaties concocted by a teen-age Named for their founder, the legendary Glorious Mundy,

The Mundys consist of 50-year-old veterans who have tottered out of retirement, a French-Canadian refugee from the Japanese League, adolescentīoys, an alcoholic ex-con ('the Babe Ruth of the Big House' when he played for Sing Sing), a peg-legged catcher, a one-armed outfielder, a midget relief pitcher and so on. The ballplayers of Roth's fable, though they bear the names of deities, are anything but images of perfection.

To the demands of the war effort and were thus condemned to play all 154 games on the road, managing to lose 120 of them. With Roth we follow the season of the worst team in the history of the game, the Mundys of Port Ruppert, New Jersey, who lost even their stadium In the Golden Age its stars, Luke Gofannon, Mike Mazda, Smokey Woden and the rest, had been the peers in skill and fame of Cobb, RuthĪnd Johnson but decline followed, and World War II drew off most of the able-bodied players. Put aside for the Columbus record, while the jock-straps dry in the bathroom.ġ943 was a bad year in the Patriot League, which as you probably don't remember was then the third major league.

Understanding of the awkward contradiction at the heart of the dream, the fact that upstairs, so to speak, there's the thing itself, the girlfriend's older brother in 'Goodbye, Columbus,' Big Ron Patimkin, the Mantovani 'The Great American Novel' is a book about baseball and its power as heroic and pastoral myth, but savingly tempered by Roth's

Sports offers a tempting glimpse of grace, of the merging of self into pure and formal function. 'Oh, to be a center fielder,Ī center fielder-and nothing more!' was the yearning cry of Alexander Portnoy, condemned like the rest of us to be a great deal more-a son, a sexual creature and a human being, among other things. Hilip Roth, who has lately seemed an author in search of a subject, turns to an old interest in his new novel.

The great american novel by philip roth