Review by Jacob Silverman The campus novel, so synonymous with satire, seems a perfect fit with our age of severe ironic detachment. It’s more difficult, even risky, for the novelist to approach the college setting from a more earnest vantage point, as a place brimming with unlimited potential – along with its corollary, suffocating failure. In his first novel, The Art of Fielding, n+1 magazine co-founder Chad Harbach chooses the latter path. He takes his subject seriously, imbuing it with all the peril of life itself, and ups the degree of difficulty by focusing on the most classically romantic of […]
