More Reviews of Pinch Hitting
Over the past several days, I read Pinch Hitting, the new novel by Morris Hoffman.
What a magical journey from mid-century America to the here and now!
Like one of those bizarre acts on the old Ed Sullivan show, Pinch Hitting manages to get a lot of plates and hats and canes into the air from atop a unicycle. It is so audacious that you dare not look away.
That’s where the magic sets in: the novel will keep those beautiful and crazy items in the air all the way to the last page. And the laws of gravity be damned.
At its heart, Pinch Hitting is a baseball story. And yet it’s not. Rather it’s a story that uses baseball’s fundamental quirkiness—quite lovingly I must add—to discuss where we find our heroes in life, where we find our loves, and our heartaches … and where we find the pluck to insist that, yes, the odds may be mortally against us, but we can still give a joyful finger to outrageous fortune.
Deion Sanders and Michael Jordan both said without hesitation that hitting a baseball was the most difficult athletic challenge they’d ever faced. Inside the first chapter of Mr. Hoffman’s wonderful novel, Sanders and Jordan are brought low in this regard by the unlikeliest of heroes. It’s at this point that, like filings to a magnet, other unlikely heroes begin to gather themselves into the story.
The tale is an impossible one, and yet, weirdly, it is very believable. Indeed, the overused concept of “magical realism” popped into my mind, as I began to write this review; and, I found myself tutt-tutting it aside. “After all,” I thought, “hadn’t Mr. Hoffman provided a satisfying explanation for each and every one of those hats and plates and canes in the air?” Yes he had. And hadn’t I pulled mightily for every one of Pinch Hitting’s delightfully-crafted central characters, even as the gods of fate—if occasionally bittersweet fate—were coming for them? Yes. I had.
It is one of those books where you come to dread looking at the page odometer. And of saying goodbye.
-Dennis Wanebo, singer-songwriter, and two-time recipient of a John Lennon International Songwriting Award