A Favorite Writer

Mark Harris, 1922-2007

For a long time, with every visit to a library or bookstore, I made sure to check the fiction section to see if there was something new from Mark Harris. I was rewarded at the rate of about once every four or five years, but even that slim prospect of some new work by Harris made it worth the habitual peek. I just found out that Harris passed away back in 2007. I learned this when I did an author search at the library (a process that became more infrequent as the years passed since the appearance of his last novel, The Tale Maker, in 1994) and saw the death date listed on his entry. I feel bad that there won't be any more books from this fine author, but then it does give me an excuse to go back and re-read (again, and in some cases for the third or fourth time) earlier favorites. He was probably best known for the exquisite baseball novel Bang the Drum Slowly, which of course isn't really about baseball at all (though it's predecessor The Southpaw is possibly the greatest ever in that genre). I also loved his two novels about academia, Wake Up Stupid! and Lying in Bed, which as much as anything else prepared me for the more absurd elements of a professor's life (The Tale Maker is of a different stripe, but no less insightful on that topic). And his poignant tribute to the promise and inevitable loss of youth, Speed, serves as a nice bookend to his much earlier Something About a Soldier which chronicles the struggles of a young man thrust into a world that did not nearly match up with his adolescent expectations. Harris' style (particularly the voices of his typically first-person narrators) seemed on first encounter kind of stilted and artificial, but is ultimately effective in defining the real, human qualities of his characters in a way that required no additional exposition. When you "heard" his characters speak (in narration or dialogue), you quickly had a handle on who they were, and what they represented, and in most cases that meant a solid American folkiness-- not in a backwoods rural sense, but representative of a down-to-earth, common sense kind of perspective on a world rife with modern challenges. The challenges sometimes were insurmountable, but Harris' characters nonetheless remained true to those values that defined them, expressing a world-view that was essentially compassionate and generous even to those who themselves in those attributes. If you'd like to check out his work, let me suggest you start with the Henry Wiggen novels (Wiggen was the narrator): The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, Ticket for a Seamstitch, and It Looked Like Forever. Even if you aren't a baseball fan, I think you'll find them all great reads.