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| The Fade-away |
| By George Jansen |
| ISBN: 978-1-929763-31-3
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| Price: $17.95 |
| Shipping: $3.00 |
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| One fog-bound night in 1900, the citizens of Port Newton, California, fish a six-foot tall, half-drowned American Indian dressed in a tuxedo out of San Francisco Bay. He turns out to be washed-up, ex-Big League pitcher Chief Dobbs—a boorish but charismatic hustler. The Chief, as one would expect, begins to lead Port Newton’s ragtag town team to victory but only by employing the dirty ball tactics of McGraw, Jennings, and the Orioles of the 1890s. The Fade-away is a comedic yet literary story about amateur baseball, love, greed, and America’s plunge into modernity. George Jansen is also the author of The Jesse James Scrapbook. His website is georgejansen.com.
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| Book Review Details: |
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| Reviewed Appeared In: Aethlon |
| Reviewed By: John DeLocca |
| Text Of Review: You can tell that George Jansen likes to tell a story and isn't really comfortable with the idea that stories have to mean something, have to leave behind some wisdom or some handy theme or two. The story here is everything--this is an old fashioned style baseball yarn about a charismatic (and decidedly crooked) Native American pitcher who, at the turn of the last century, washes up in a small California town (literally, he is fished out of the nearby bay, half dead) and introduces to its hapless semi-pro ballclub the finer points of winning at all costs (most notably by importing ringers to help beef up the lineup). The larger lessons about competition and the dynamics and desperate logic of cheating (in the light of countless contemporary professional athletics scandals), the implications of racism within sports he Chief endures plenty of blatant taunting and the ringer he brings in is Cuban) and the tolerance die-hard fans suddenly develop when minority players provides them winning ball, and even the difficult cultural evolution into what we now see as the modern era defined by consumerism and the ethos of winning at all costs, Jansen just wants to tell a story. He delights in setting scenes, delights in the characters that he conjures in the small fishing town (he hands over the narrative to a handful of alternative perspectives among the town's elite, each created into a voice that is distinctive and immediate), and delights in weaving a tale full of turns (even at the risk of melodrama--a considerable subplot on romance across racial lines and another in a kind of murder mystery) aided ably by the natural suspense available in chronicling a season in which a struggling ballclub for the first time savors the experience of winning and must come ultimately to confront the implications of the morality of the game. Thus, despite the darker implications of the themes serious readers will desire, the storyline here creates its own energy, the characters create their own fun, and the book manages to preserve a playful sense of comedy and irony. The momentum of the plot--which moves with a compelling sort of high morality to an apocalyptic conflagration at the ballpark that provides a bit of a heavyhanded judgment against the club's shall we say moral lapse--indicates that Jansen is not terribly adept with the architecture of a story nor with subtlety--the Epilogue provides a desperate catch-all of themes you can choose and the narrative ends with the mighty Chief last glimpsed, years later, rather unsubtlely, as a pathetic peanut vendor in a stadium--but the ride itself is worth the reading time. Clever, funny, engaging, cinematic (you sort of immediately cast the characters along the way), with a few issues (the prose struggles with dialogue, too often it is filler and even then it tries to "do" slang as a way to sound authentic but comes across as obviously written), it is a rewarding read. |
| Date Reviewed: Spring/Summer 2008 |
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