PITCHING TO GIRAFFES

A college pitcher is caught between baseball and Nixon-era campus politics in Puszykowski’s debut novel.

John Light walked onto his baseball team at his small Michigan college suddenly in possession of an impressive fastball that had eluded him during his high school career. Now he’s in his senior year and the team has a real shot at winning the league championship. John should be excited, but he’s discontent. The philosophy and politics he’s been reading about at night—unrelated to his pharmacy major—have been exposing him to new ideas, helping him to see the flaws in America and its institutions, and he’s beginning to suspect some sort of youth-led revolutionary change might be necessary. Even though it’s 1972, conservative Wrencher College hasn’t yet felt the spirit of the 1960s. “Every year brought more long hair, more beards, more flared, torn jeans, more tie-dye, more beads, and more flannel shirts, but no groups organized to spread information or employ rebellious energy like everywhere else on the planet,” John narrates. “Wrencher was a time bubble stuck ten years in the past.” As John starts to attend peace rallies and demonstrations, he gets connected to a network of student activists, at Wrencher and elsewhere, who are willing to go to extreme lengths to make their voices heard. Meanwhile, his well-meaning coach’s efforts to secure the team the championship are undermined by the players’ antics, immaturity, and penchant for distraction. When the opportunity arises for John to put his politics into action, he must decide which rules he is willing to break, and what it will mean—for himself and for his team—when he breaks them.

Puszykowski is an adept writer, particularly about baseball. Here, John imagines a fireball moving through his body as he throws a pitch: “As I pushed forward to pitch, it rode up my thrusting thigh muscles, entered my twisting hips and into my upper torso as I opened up, shot through my pitching arm as it whipped forward, crackled through the snap of my wrist, and sparked out from my fingers as they propelled the baseball: powerful, rhythmic and fluent.” But the combination of baseball and radical campus activism makes for a sometimes overwhelming baby boomer cocktail—all 46 chapters are named for popular songs from the era, including “Bad Moon Rising,” “Instant Karma,” and “What’s Going On?” At one point, John and his catcher discuss Beatles lyrics: “I thought of how music can bring people together, like at Woodstock, ya know? That’s what this team needs, to pull together.” Puszykowski doesn’t seem to know much more than John does about what to do with this moment of cultural upheaval, failing to establish why it might be important or what any of it has to do with college baseball. The result is a narrative without much incident and a narrator too ambivalent and reserved to really carry a novel with his voice alone. The story is believable and successful at capturing a common experience of adolescence, but it is not always compelling.

A meandering campus novel about finding one’s place in a crucial moment in history.