The buddy movie has never gone away, though recently renamed the bromance, but it can often seem unsure of itself.

Then the Kinsey report was published, and innocence seemed either self-deception or ruse. The feelings it channelled were the ones that powered not just sporting events but armies and empires. This sort of relationship between young men once attracted no attention by the intensity of its innocence. All of this Mike Schwartz, unresenting Salieri to this unlikely Mozart of the baseball diamond, makes possible by getting Henry accepted at his own college of Westish in north‑eastern Wisconsin. Henry's profound knack isn't integrated into anything much resembling a personality, so he must learn to function socially and emotionally, and also to deepen his game in areas other than his mysterious gift, his ability to respond to a response almost before it has taken place. He is a natural genius as a shortstop, possessor of something closer to a superpower than a talent. The story begins and ends with Mike Schwartz, all-round undergraduate athlete and driven man, and Henry Skrimshander, who can do only two things, namely place his catcher's mitt exactly where the ball will arrive off a player's bat and then throw it with great force and accuracy to where it needs to be. There are only a few passages of unrelieved sporting technicality ('Rick O'Shea laced a one-hopper to the Amherst third baseman, who set in motion an easy double play') and even these are supported by the emotional narrative. C had Harbach's The Art of Fielding cross-breeds two genres with limited gene pools, the baseball novel and the campus novel, and comes up with a vigorous hybrid, entertaining and engrossing, though almost absurdly high-minded.

The art of fielding book