Malamud brings back the cocksure rookie who finally beats his way up, convinces the skeptics, transforms the team single-handed from a last-place club into a pennant contender, and breaks a few records while he’s at it. But the fact that The Natural at the same time preserves and revitalizes so much of the “traditional” baseball story is the best thing about it. “Serious” means simply that the book appeals to a wider range of emotions and ideas than those which hang on winning or losing the game. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is the first serious novel we have had (after Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al`) about a baseball player. But it would be difficult to guess from high-brow modern fiction or criticism, with their constant emphasis on knowledge and ideas, that intelligent people are capable of responding to fire-engines, anthems, soldiers, or baseball players at all.Ĭonsequently, the appearance of an intelligent novelist who finds it possible to say something about a popular-“mass”-phenomenon through the medium of a popular literary form is a very healthy sign. Whether or not this is a valuable chill depends on how the writer uses it like all forms of power, a knowledge of what to appeal to in the reader can be used or abused. When a film about the Marines, no matter how stupid it may be, ends with “The Halls of Monte-zuma” throbbing in the background as John Wayne and company go forward staunchly to defend the Good, everyone feels a chill stealing up his spine. Bad art has been allowed to monopolize the thunderbolts which once belonged as a matter of course to writers who knew better what to do with them.
The fact that a book touches something deep in us is no guarantee that it will be a good book but the trouble with serious contemporary fiction in general is its neglect of the ordinary nerves which continue to be the most sensitive ones.
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