The might have been : a novel /

The effort to sustain the tradition of the great American baseball novel receives an honorable boost with this meticulously peopled tale of opportunities lost. Like Chad Harbach's "Art of Fielding," Schuster's first novel pivots on a midgame accident: a rude encounter with a chain-link fence that jettisons the prospects of a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder named Edward Everett Yates. Ditching a fiancée and the secure ennui of his uncle's flour business, Yates takes another shot at a baseball career, only to find himself, decades later, pushing 60 with a scattershot résumé as a minor-league manager and serial mismanager of personal relationships. Yates dodges an array of traps laid out within a nonlinear time frame that heightens the poignancy of his life choices. The occasional lazy descriptive sentence or foray into hotel-bedroom farce is recompensed by Schuster's vigorous supporting roster of problem-child players, skinflint team owners and M.B.A.flaunting executives. Best, perhaps, is the book's small bounty of frisky, take-charge older women, a rarity in a genre conventionally strewed with the put-upon young widows of summer.

Lifelong obsession is hauntingly portrayed in this winning debut novel tracing the life of a baseball player who only wants to play the game. When minor league ballplayer Edward Everett Yates finally gets his shot at the majors, his outing is marred by injury. His resulting forced retirement from baseball opens up a new future filled with love, a family, and a steady career as a salesman working with his uncle-if only he can give up his passion for the game. Schuster displays his deep knowledge of the minutiae of baseball as both game and business while sensitively addressing the regrets and self-doubt of a man torn between his devotion to a sport and his attraction to a conventional life with women, ranging from his high school friend Connie to his minor league sweetheart, Julie. Edward Everett's life is eventually narrowed by chance and his own choices to a final opportunity as coach of a struggling minor league team. This moving tale will engage even nonbaseball fans as Schuster examines, without succumbing to sentiment or an easy resolution, the cost of chasing a dream. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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