[In the following essay, Lauricella considers The Natural as a composite of novel and romance with a “failed hero.”]

The romance, which deals with heroes, is intermediate between the novel, which deals with men, and the myth, which deals with gods.

—Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

Since its publication almost fifty years ago, Bernard Malamud's first novel has been the object of so much critical attention that a recent commentator has remarked, “The Natural lives to be interpreted—or did before it was interpreted to death.”¹ It is regrettable that the book's mythic content should have caused its demise after having vouchsafed it a kind of vogue among academically-trained readers, but this fate is, perhaps, poetically just. Its hero, Roy Hobbs, is similarly undone by mythic forces, which initially lend him the figure and substance of a superhuman athlete capable of miraculous feats. Like the heroes whose legendary exploits his own performances shadow, Roy seems to be part divine. Humble origins, however, and an ordinary character (as well as a peasant's name) indicate that Roy's heroic pretensions are a sham; in the end, he is revealed as little more than the defeated knight of a modern romance. His story begins as a comic melodrama of the American Dream, then swiftly turns into a cautionary tale about the self-destructive nature of hubris. The balance of the narrative depicts Roy trying to live correctly in his “second life,” which Iris Lemon describes as “the life we live with after” our first life of critical learning.² In his second life, Roy attempts to claim everything he believes he has lost through the “accident” of fifteen years before, not the least of which are the badges of athletic valor: a column of estimable statistics set down beside his name in the record book and public adulation as “‘the best there ever was in the game’” (33).

More important, however, than fame, more important than women and money, are the time and space of home. Having hardly possessed a home, having lived most of his life with no sense of being “at home,” Roy seeks not a place but a way of living that will return him to the serene self-sufficiency that he remembers as the best part of his boyhood. Estranged from this youthful plenitude by dislocation and abandonment, Roy struggles to return to time past, to being the boy he once was and recapturing the boy's feeling of contentment and well-being. In this sense, home for Roy is a state of inner peace—a state of mind and soul—rather than a physical location. His final baseball season recounts Roy's quest for such peace and how that quest goes wrong. Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the Natural's career is that Roy recognizes how to return home but fails to commit himself to the actions that would lead him toward reunion. Unable to accept the finitude of his existence, unwilling to deny or even stem his appetites, Roy Hobbs learns nothing from his first life and so relives its mistakes in his second. His journey ends with the beginning of another exile, suggesting that Roy is condemned to repeat the cycle of pain and doom thereafter. The story one hopes will end happily resolves itself as the tragicomedy of a failed hero.

To appreciate the nature of Roy's thwarted quest, one must approach The Natural not simply as a novel but as a Romance. According to Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the genre's foremost practitioners, the Romance takes shape in the author's darkened study suffused with moonlight.³ Spilling through a window, “falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,” moonlight can render the familiar room “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.”⁴ The light's peculiar cast causes a slight skewing of ordinary vision that transforms the commonplace into something unfamiliar. A book written to capture such a vision is a Romance, which differs from a Novel in its representation of reality, or mimesis. The Novel intends “a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience”; the Romance enjoys “a certain latitude” of style and substance, and presents “the truth of the human heart” with an admixture of “the Marvellous,” according to the author's “choosing and creation” (Seven Gables 351). Although “it must rigidly subject itself to laws” (Seven Gables 351), the Romance is not expected by its readers to be completely plausible. One might consider it a heightened or more obviously “artificial” form of prose fiction. In foregrounding the archetypal nature of its characters and infusing events with symbolic meaning, the Romance tries not to be “like life” but larger than life: more colorful and exciting, more lavishly given over to heroic or magical deeds, more resonant with awareness of the great issues at stake. In a Romance, strange events occur; physical laws are often suspended. Action is not limited to the necessary, inevitable, or merely surprising but incorporates the melodramatic and symbolic while maintaining the narrative's aesthetic coherence.⁵

The Natural presents readers with a particular challenge, for it is not a “pure” Romance but a composite of Romance and Novel.⁶ The book mixes the significant detail, colloquial language, and characterization of a Novel with the symbolic content and magical events of a Romance. Because the action conforms more to a mythic template than to the demands of verisimilitude, the magical trumps the realistic at moments of crisis or impasse. This varied mimesis troubles many readers; some, expecting the representation of reality to be consistent, find the book silly or tedious. Admittedly, if mimetic and tonal consistency are taken to be definitive of the formal realism of the Novel, then The Natural cannot seriously be considered a novel at all. Its mimetic shifts are often abrupt and occasionally startling, and the reader might legitimately feel disoriented from chapter to chapter or even from one paragraph to the next. Individualized characters just slightly more distinct than caricatures or types gesture within a loosely knit allegory, intermittently re-enacting ancient rituals in a realistic context. Magical effects compromise verisimilitude and heighten the symbolic quality of fictive events. To make sense of the narrative, one must read it on its own terms, according to its own “given”: as a prose romance that selectively utilizes certain elements of the Novel, according to its author's judgment.⁷

As a novelistic romance, The Natural is generally read as a retelling of the regeneration myths of Western culture. Critics soon noticed the interpenetrating renditions of fertility paradigm, Arthurian legend, and Jungian archetype that crowd its narrative, and assiduously combed the pages of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890-1915), Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), and T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” (1922) to identify the archetypes that Malamud transposes into images of modern America.⁸ As its title indicates, Malamud's version foregrounds the hero, whose arrival in a desiccated land seems to portend a season of new birth: a greening of the fields and the spiritual redemption of the people. Baseball serves as an acculturating device that translates the myths of, respectively, Osiris, Demeter, the Grail quest heroes, and Christ for a twentieth-century American audience, and thereby enables the author to invest a modern artifact (the game of baseball and its long season) with ancient meaning.⁹ In this construction, the contemporary significance of Malamud's transformative vision remains the final item of debate, for the Passion of Roy Hobbs, unlike that of the martyred gods and exemplary heroes whose trials he recapitulates, is unredemptive. Malamud emphasizes the old god's death and downplays the advent of the new god, whose appearance a reader of legend or myth would expect to inspire celebration—and narrative focus. At this crux, the story follows a novelistic mode; as if obsessed with the demise of its (anti)hero, the narrative pursues Roy Hobbs into a figurative grave with Wonderboy, shattered talisman of his natural prowess, then devolves to a full stop, truncated and unredeemed by the dying god's “many bitter tears” (237). In a sense, Malamud has it both ways, but even the new god's premature arrival (the season is October, not April) and the pathos of Roy's defeat cannot obviate the sense of a pessimistic ending. Critics have proposed various explanations for this resolution: the obdurate selfishness of the modern hero; the corrupt society whose debased values the hero assimilates and enacts; the inadequacy of the athlete, no matter how gifted, to serve his culture as a true hero; the template of myth and legend and the completion of its fixed pattern that preordains the hero's demise.¹⁰The Natural invites this kind of analysis, requires it in fact. Before attempting a broader discussion, one is virtually obligated to review the story from the perspective of the myths and archetypes that form so large a part of its critical legacy.

Endlessly allusive, elaborately patterned, The Natural demonstrates that baseball's “rules and realities,”¹¹ as Jacques Barzun has described them, can supply both subject matter and metaphor in a self-consciously “literary” work. Roy Hobbs, a naïve athlete with heroic aspirations who springs from America's rustic West, enjoys in his youth a brief baseball triumph played in an interstice of time. In an impromptu contest, Roy strikes out the American League's best hitter with three magical pitches, thereby winning the adulation of Harriet Bird, cryptic classicist and student of mythology. Lured by desire into conversation with Harriet, Roy unknowingly reveals the self-centered hubris that must disqualify him from serving his culture as a legitimate hero.¹² The veiled femme fatale judges the Natural to be a false idol, unworthy of adulation, and executes her verdict by shooting Roy with a silver bullet. Consigned to a fifteen years' wandering in the wilderness,¹³ Roy is finally restored to the baseball diamond by what seems to be poetic justice cooperating with time. A reborn rookie at age 34, Roy is vouchsafed a single season on earth. He brings rain to a dry land, transforms defeat into victory, collects life-enhancing hits, suffers killing strikeouts, and leads the Knights toward the goal most prized: the league pennant. Alternately tested and tempted by the life-giving and death-dealing avatars of the archetypal Mother (Mater Magna and Mater Saeva, respectively [Wasserman 448]), Roy's life pivots on a final decision. At his moment of truth, the Natural succumbs to the same self-centered impulse that has caused his first death. He takes the Judge's bribe money to throw the playoff game without understanding that it is blood money, and that it is his own blood that will be shed in pursuit of the bitch-goddess of success, Memo Paris, “a whore” (235). At the moment of public crisis, Roy realizes his transgression but, having repented too late, fails to connect with the decisive pitch. His personal life parallels his baseball performances and similarly deteriorates despite (or because of) his overreaching ambition to “make it big.” Like the climactic swing-and-miss, Roy does not “connect” with the characters he most needs to know, particularly Iris Lemon, and understands at his career's end that he is the once-and-future victim of his own nature. The reader's corresponding insight is that Roy Hobbs cannot elude the logic of his temporal existence. Striving always to regain lost time and return to the younger, better self whom he believes he has left in the distant past as well as to catch up with his destiny of baseball glory, Roy is unable to live in a finite present in which his ambitions are compromised by age. Having seen the best of his time before he begins, the Natural never enjoys a fruition of love, family, or home. Emblematic of a fertility god but desperate to resist the progress of the seasons, Roy Hobbs is a sterile icon.

At every moment of fear, soul-searching, or self-doubt, Roy reveals his concern with time. Even before Harriet Bird inflicts the gunshot wound that initiates the exile of his first life, Roy is aware of the temporal disjunction that has already placed him behind his time. Looking out the window of the eastbound train, Roy sees dawn breaking yet knows that time has already been lost: “somewhere near they left Mountain Time and lost—no, picked up—yes, it was lost an hour, what Sam called the twenty-three hour day” (12). Roy is able to anticipate the break of day without a timepiece (9) yet is incapable of telling time as a clock measures it. Having entered the tick-tock of ordinary chronology when he boarded the train, Roy's temporal progress proves to be swift and virtually unchecked; apart from the pause during which he vanquishes the Whammer, the train carries Roy steadily away from his origins (in both time and distance) with every minute's mile. Insofar as it expresses these dimensions of the time-space continuum, the image of the speeding train neatly embodies Roy's temporal dilemma: He must be on the train (in the stream of time) to reach his destination (the majors), but the logic of such travel will inevitably bring him to the end of his time. Having ridden these rails, Roy eventually will be obliged to disembark.

The power of this image becomes evident during Roy's “second life,” his season with the Knights. Upon his arrival, Roy sits in the Knight's dugout, trying to rest from his journey. He knows that he is fifteen years late; haunted by the specter of a train that is always in motion, Roy feels that he still has a distance to go, that although his body is motionless, his mind and inner being still travel “on the train that never stopped … through towns and cities, across forests and fields, over long years” (47). The author's expression of this sentiment sets the tone of Roy's impatience, which never completely subsides. Acutely aware of his own belatedness, Roy is unreconciled to time's passing. His anxiety to retrieve the time he has lost is so intense that the present, no matter how gratifying, seems intolerably belated; to Roy, any success he enjoys should have come much, much sooner. Despite his great feats as a hitter, accomplished in merely a matter of weeks, Roy feels dissatisfied with the present and eager for the advent of a more wondrous impending day: “He was gnawed by a nagging impatience—so much more to do, so much of the world to win for himself. He felt he had nothing of value yet to show for what he was accomplishing, and in his dreams he still sped over endless miles of monotonous rail toward something he desperately wanted. Memo, he sighed” (91). It is as if his destiny had unfolded without him, if such a thing were possible, yet were still within reach, so hot is his desire to catch up. Roy's urgency is pervasive, affecting everything he does and says, even constructing the future as something, a time, a place, a person, that is endlessly deferred and ever unattainable. As time continues to slip away, as he watches everything he should already have “[won] for himself” pass beyond his grasp, Roy veers into panic and dread. At the first nadir of his second life, the batting slump that sets in shortly after his night ride with Memo, Roy fantasizes about escape. Chronic failure has brought the rebuke of the fans down on him, and his own frailty—intermittent physical weakness and his refusal (which is really a form of pride) to give up Wonderboy—leaves him without resources to endure it. At this juncture, Roy imagines the ever-traveling train as a means of escaping from his present suffering and returning to a home that he knows does not exist. Awaking alone in the locker room, Roy tries to tell the time by his wristwatch; its being “past midnight” (139) suggests not only the loss of the present (now just-passed) day but also the imminent end of Roy's belated baseball season. At such a moment it is understandable that Roy yearns for human companionship and the safety of home: “He longed for a friend, a father, a home to return to—saw himself packing his duds in a suitcase, buying a ticket, and running for a train. Beyond the first station he'd fling Wonderboy out the window. (Years later, an old man returning to the city for a visit, he would scan the flats to see if it was there, glowing in the mud.) The train sped through the night across the country. In it he felt safe” (139). Even without the wristwatch Roy would know that the hour is late, the day spent, that his own time is quickly wasting. Showing and feeling his age, Roy experiences something like a midlife crisis, his distress evoking a proleptic vision of himself as an old man revisiting the scene of his present undoing. His desire for “a home to return to” is poignant, given his lifelong itinerancy, and appropriately vague; he approaches this home by train but never arrives. Roy's vision of going home is one of an endlessly suspended animation: a train hurtling across the dark continent with himself inside it, feeling a sense of shelter. Implicitly an image of temporal regression (as the train travels westward, Roy will regain the hours he has lost fifteen years ago), the imaginary train ride suggests that the process of moving homeward is almost as desirable as home itself. Home might turn out to be illusory, a bit of wishful thinking, so Roy finds comfort in making the search and believing in it. Yet, as he realizes in the next moment, for Roy even the journey is impossible—but not only for the reasons he assumes.

Home is inaccessible to Roy because his sense of it is identical to his sense of himself as he was as a boy. More than parents or a family, more than any region or town, Roy's point of origin is his boyish self dwelling not so much within time as amidst a natural landscape set in an eternal past.¹⁴ Malamud establishes this trope in “Pre-game,” the book's self-contained parable of prefigurement, and returns to it thereafter. Roy, gazing from the train window during his initial journey, imagines a primal scene that displaces traditional notions of home and family. As if it were real, Roy sees a “bone-white farmhouse with sagging skeletal porch, alone in untold miles of moonlight, and before it this white-faced, long-boned boy whipped with train-whistle yowl a glowing ball to someone hidden under a dark oak, who shot it back without thought, and the kid once more wound and returned” (9). Roy's impulse to recall the temporal space of home evokes an image of hauntedness and compulsion. What is presumably a father-son game of catch transpires in front of charnel-house or sepulchre, automatic hands throwing and catching a radiant ball without apparent joy or sense of communion. The father is invisible, the boy a ghost-figure, implying that the vision is substanceless, a graphic hallucination or dream of fear. Roy shuns this unreal vision, aware that it is, in some emotional or psychic sense, metaphorically accurate, “a way … of observing himself” (9). The scene is not a memory but a sight of pre-memory, an image of what Roy believes must be true about his unremembered home, given his current homelessness. The most telling detail is the “train-whistle yowl” that accents the thrown ball, for this sound effect links the lost scene of play to the journey of “the train that never stopped” (47). Taken together, these elements make Roy's ghostly vision the essential metaphoric expression of the Natural's antagonistic relationship to time, as well as the emblem of his desperate effort to dissolve that conflict in baseball. The vision is unique—it never reappears, and Roy does not revisit either the “bone-white farmhouse” or the game of catch—but its thematic content is reprised many times throughout The Natural.

Thus, Roy's conception of home is not grounded in a specific house nor dependent on other characters. Indeed, his idea of being “at home” is solitary, yet not lonely, and matches the disposition of an introspective mind with the “uncivilized” man's way of living in the moment, as if Huck Finn were a student of Emerson's writings. Like Huck, Roy Hobbs recoils from civilized versions of home life, preferring self-sufficient freedom in natural environs. As if he can foretell at the outset everything that will befall him, Roy leaves his rustic origins with trepidation. He seems to know that his movement through time, toward civilization, will culminate in a permanent estrangement from his natural home. Watching from the train, Roy feels the onset of melancholy as he notices land and sky receding, blending into indistinctness. Once lost, his sense of place seems irrecoverable, as if the place itself has disappeared. The past seems to collapse behind him, his vistas closing down like a door swinging shut on a fading day (22). Roy himself feels homeless, a man who comes from nowhere on his way to a vaguely threatening future, as if the train were headed into a storm. It is a classic case of homesickness, which seems paradoxical, given Roy's own sense of homelessness. At this early juncture, before his exile (which begins after he is shot), Roy's melancholy seems overstated; as far as the reader can tell, home exists only as a vision of a whitened sepulchre and as “somewhere, a place he knew was there” (22). Neither offers much hope of reunion. Indeed, Roy's early misgivings (9-10, 22-23) almost lapse into the sentimental or morbid, as if he fears that homesickness might become chronic and end in death.

Roy's premature, perhaps excessive melancholy at having “lost the feeling of a particular place” (22) indicates the true nature of what he considers his home. His attraction to natural landscapes and his sense of contentment within them places the matter beyond any doubt. By day, the train window affords Roy a view of forests and hills, then a level woodland that, in most of the ways that mean anything, has given Roy his only true sense of home. The woodland is “the only place he had been truly intimate with in his wanderings, a green world shot through with weird light and strange bird cries, muffled in silence that made the privacy so complete his inmost self had no shame of anything he thought there, and it eased the body-shaking beat of his ambitions” (22-23). Vague, practically unlocatable, this version of home has nonetheless lent Roy a sense of well-being and self-sufficiency, a feeling of safety, all of which he lacks during his baseball career. It is a telling detail, and one that foreshadows his frustration and failure, that Roy ponders returning home so soon after having left it. He has yet to transcend his liminal status as an untested pitcher—his initiation into athletic glory is shortly to follow—yet he feels an impulse to return to boyhood, as if sensing the imminence of Harriet's silver bullet, as well as the inevitability of his final defeat.¹⁵

Although he evokes his younger self several times during his season of sin and expiation, Roy does not derive constructive knowledge from it. All he possesses of this boyish Natural is a modest collection of images, all so familiar and summarily recollected that the “boy-Roy” figure seems little more than one of American culture's many clichés. Roy conceives one such cliché when, newly arrived in the major leagues, he finds the professional baseball scene to be something other than what he has expected: strange, faintly hostile, overtly profane, essentially disappointing. Roy considers simply walking away, “jumping back on a train, and going wherever people went when they were running out on something. Maybe for a long rest in one of those towns he had lived in as a kid. Like the place where he had that shaggy mutt that used to scamper through the woods, drawing him after it to the deepest, stillest part, till the silence was so pure you could crack it if you threw a rock” (52). Confronted with the quotidian realities of baseball, Roy sees the past beckoning. His alternatives are to play the role of the Natural or devolve to the cliché of a boy and his dog. The landscape is an ancient wood, the time an indefinite past, and his mother and father are absent: not much of a home, but the only inkling of home that Roy can recall. His parents are absent because he seems hardly to have known them.¹⁶ His mother was “‘a whore. She spoiled [his] old man's life’”; his father was “‘a good guy but died young’” (185), who, Roy tells Harriet, installed him in a series of orphan homes, retrieving him during the summer to teach him baseball (32). Still, Roy does not blame his parents for the strange predicament his life has become, just as he does not yearn to go back to being their son or to any orphan home. Self-invented and self-driven, Roy is a simple fellow, a true Natural. He wishes to return home only to recover the boy he was before something changed powerfully within: “Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions—often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had—a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved … and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood” (117). This “old thought” (117) visits Roy anew as he and Memo drive through the woods in Roy's new Mercedes-Benz. Both the setting and the companionship are cues for the thought to recur; his lost self haunts the woods' moonlit stillness, and “Memo” is a phonic and graphic substitution for “memory.” Roy's overmastering attraction to Memo begins in “the act of love” (77) and continues because “she was a truly beautiful doll with a form like Miss America” (166), but in symbolic terms it tells the reader that Roy is in thrall to memory, which he (erroneously) believes will sustain his athletic potency. To Roy, possessing Memo means recapturing the promise of his youth. He pursues her, yearns for her, ultimately forgoes his only real chance of redemption by committing his future to Memo(ry), a visible form and symbol of the past.

Roy's error becomes obvious on that night's wild ride. Having previously summoned the boy-Roy image and envied its simple inner-life and generative solitude, Roy translates the image into a desire for home. As if time, his own unconscious, and the earth itself were conspiring to afford him a glimpse of his own soul, Roy is visited by a sign that his better self still lives, wandering the night like a wraith. With Memo driving fast without lights (memory cannot see what lies ahead), the night's dappled shadows and ghostly light reveal an embodiment of the past. Just as Roy is wishing he could return to a home, he glimpses

in the moonlight a boy coming out of the woods, followed by his dog. Squinting through the windshield, he was unable to tell if the kid was an illusion thrown forth by the trees or someone really alive. After fifteen seconds he was still there. Roy yelled to Memo to slow down in case he wanted to cross the road. Instead, the car shot forward so fast the woods blurred, the trees racing along like shadows in weak light, then skipping into black and white, finally all black and the moon was gone.

[122-123]

Roy shouts for light. Memo does not respond, so he turns on the headlamps himself. Memo screams, wrenches the steering wheel, and Roy feels the impact of the car's hitting something, he is not sure what. He tells Memo to stop, that they have run someone down, but Memo refuses, her face as white as the moon. When Roy claims that they must have hit a person because he has heard a human groan, Memo replies, “‘That was yourself’” (123). Roy, however, cannot remember having made a sound. Despite the scene's apparent terror, it matters less whether the boy is “real” (an independent character) or a projection of Roy's psyche than that Roy sees the figure, recognizes it, and apprehends that Memo has run it down, not merely intentionally but heedlessly and with seeming vengeance. It seems paradoxical that Memo would attempt to expunge Roy's memory of himself, yet she needs him, on another level of mimesis, to serve her own practical ends. Knowing or guessing that his sense of his better self is the only independent strength Roy has, Memo tries to destroy it so that he will become more the Natural at her behest and, as idiot, simpleton, or fool submit ever more compliantly to her demands. And yet, novelistic realism only tints this scene, for Memo's responses are surpassingly odd if judged by the standards of verisimilitude: she acts by turns like zombie, murderess, and hysteric (123). It might be that, like another American bitch-goddess, Daisy Fay, of an earlier American fable, The Great Gatsby, Memo is literally “a bad driver” (Gatsby 138). And yet it is Roy who wrecks the Mercedes (124) and, in his death agonal, wounds Iris Lemon with a foul ball purposively struck in anger (223-224). No doubt Nick Carraway would call both of them dangerous for the way they conduct their respective lives, yet such a judgment would be irrelevant to their emblematic roles. Memo's behavior, like Roy's vision of the boy, is shaped not by the criteria of verisimilitude but by the story's symbolic rationale. Even the landscape of moonlight and woods and “trees racing along like shadows in weak light” indicate that this scene is the medium of a Romance.

As Hawthorne would have it, the actual and the imaginary meet on the road that night, and “each imbue[s] itself with the nature of the other.” Thus, when Roy returns to what he believes is the scene of the accident, he finds neither a broken body nor sign of injury. Quite simply, he mistakes the mimesis of the event. Like the sportswriters who debate how Roy has been able literally to knock the cover off a baseball (79), Roy tries to understand a magical event through the logic of tangible evidence. Because the story includes several banal acts of magic, like Roy's plucking an egg from Memo's bosom and spilling silver dollars from Gus's nose (112-113), events like the coverless baseball unraveling into center field ought to be called preter-Natural. The truth of what happens on the road that night, like the explanation for what happens to the baseball Roy flays on the first day of summer, is not reducible to the terms of causal realism. The narrative offers a few false hints—the sportswriters' debate about the type of swing necessary to shear the cover off a baseball, Roy's scanning the newspapers for reports of a hit-and-run accident (131)—then quickly forgets them. Despite one sportswriter's experiment with “a hard downward chop” that “[splits] the horsehide” (82) and Roy's finding no news of a vehicular manslaughter, all explanations are inconclusive and become, after a point, misleading. Malamud is either anxious about orchestrating conjunctions of “the Actual and the Imaginary” and ostensibly attempts to mitigate their strangeness, or is subtly teasing the reader with bogus possibilities that underline the monumental irrelevance of interpreting preter-Natural events according to the standards of causal realism.

Many of the book's major episodes possess this preter-Natural quality and can be satisfactorily understood only as a conjunction of “the Actual and the Imaginary.” Roy's meeting with Iris Lemon, which initiates the countermovement to his death-dance with Memo, is such a moment. When Iris appears, Roy is still caught in the grip of death, figured as an extended batting slump, and is desperate for release. He steps to the plate in Chicago, an unconfident pinch hitter dreading repeated failure and, having promised to hit a home run for a dying boy (Pete Barney), sick at heart at what failure now might mean. The pitcher, Toomey, gets two quick strikes on Roy, and then Iris intervenes. When she stands up, the fans try to hoot her down, but she ignores them and waits. Catching sight of her, Roy apprehends that “her smile was for him. Now why would she do that for? She seemed to be wanting to say something, and then it flashed on him the reason she was standing was to show her confidence in him. He felt surprised that anybody would want to do that for him. At the same time he became aware that the night had spread out in all directions and was filled with an unbelievable fragrance” (147). Hooting at Iris to sit down, like assuming that she is “mixed up about the seventh inning stretch” (145), is to approach this scene with a stubbornly realistic imagination. By the same token, the game's being played at night despite the fact that night baseball did not come to Wrigley Field until 1988 is irrelevant to the moment's symbolic accuracy. What matters is that Iris transforms the night through her act of faith. The moment coheres: The pitcher throws; Roy swings, connects; the ball streaks through the pitcher's legs, flies over the second baseman's glove, rises “through the light and up into the dark,” finally soars skyward “like a white star seeking an old constellation” (147). Literally a “star-shot,” Roy's home run saves Mike Barney's son and establishes the crucial link between Roy Hobbs and Iris Lemon.

Having saved the Natural from an untimely death (it is still summer), Iris presides at his confession of his past mistake and witnesses his return to power and grace. Vouchsafing himself the recompense of reunion that the game has lately withheld, Roy crashes four consecutive home runs in a single contest against the Pirates (the Knights' archrival) and enjoys four unhampered passages around the bases and back to home (177). A few games later, Roy continues his assault on time by hitting a line drive that shatters a clock on an outfield fence (178): “The clock spattered minutes all over the place, and after that the Dodgers never knew what time it was” (178). In the a-temporal aftermath, Roy collects fourteen consecutive hits, fully regaining what he has languished without during the devastating slump, “the special exercise of running the bases … the gloating that blew up his lungs when he crossed the plate” (132). Touching home plate inspires Roy as with the breath of life, as one might expect of an impatient exile seeking home. Then, too, his counterclockwise movement around the diamond figuratively undoes time, as if he were retracting the unwinding hours. For Roy, time and its deferral or extension is the essence of the game despite the fact that, within baseball's clockless parameters, time itself is comparatively powerless. Baseball's temporal space is similar to an eternal present, for any inning, any game, can in theory last forever. Play continues until a certain level of failure is reached, regardless of the elapsed time, so Roy can assuage his chronophobia by achieving perfect competence. If the Knights score runs and make no outs, inning and game will never end, time will (seemingly) not expire, and Roy Hobbs will find compensation for the years he has lost. Although he does not articulate these ideas, Roy does understand one way in which baseball mitigates the horror of time's passing and provides the player with the means to a modest immortality: “‘if you leave all those records that nobody else can beat—they'll always remember you. You sorta never die’” (156). With Roy restored to himself by Iris's intervention and the Knights on the verge of clinching the pennant, this baseball romance seems destined for the generic end of all Romance: homecoming, reunion, reconciliation, marriage.

The Natural swerves, however, from this generic ending, for Roy cannot stay the homeward course. The beguilements of Memo(ry), as well as Roy's inability to reintegrate the boy-Roy contentment into his adult psyche, dictate that he will miss his chance to connect with Iris, the only character who can teach him how to live apart from his baseball vainglory and the stultifying demands of his animal appetites. It is truly the whiff of a lifetime, and it precludes Roy's arrival at home. It might be most accurate to say that Roy convinces himself to reject Iris until accepting her is too little, too late to redeem his accumulated errors. Just as these errors are his responsibility despite the archetypal patterns that tend to decree them (see Pifer 151), so is Roy complicit in formulating his own demise by subscribing to a definition of self that engages all of the terms of solipsistic and mythic pretension. At the heart of this self-conception is Roy's belief, at once desperate and pathetic, in his own permanent youthfulness. At its simplest, Roy's clinging to boyhood is his most direct way of denying the passage of time, and is inscribed in his playing, at 34, the boy's game. On another level of abstraction, Roy's continual recourse to the boy-Roy image expresses his desire to return home, even if the home he envisions exists only in his mind and is, for all practical purposes, inaccessible. This conception of home is, moreover, essentially boyish. Solitary, self-indulgent, and sterile, it constitutes a shirking of responsibility, a shrinking from challenge, and as such is useless to a man. As one might except, Roy's insistence on remaining boyish and thinking of himself in boyish terms culminates in his inability to conceive a mature image of home. This failure, in turn, finally undermines the only relationship that can grant Roy the opportunity of a fruitful homecoming.

Iris Lemon, mother at 16 years of age and grandmother by 33 is an embodiment of repletion, a human cornucopia of life-wisdom and life itself. After she restores the hero to his natural abilities, Iris tries to emend Roy's limited notion of the meaning of his achievements. She reminds Roy of the boys who regard him as a hero and role model, not just as a baseball player but also as a man, and tries to dissuade him from investing the statistical achievements of the diamond with inordinate value (156). Roy imperfectly understands her counsel; he recognizes in Iris a cessation of his suffering at the hands of women but not that his suffering is an index of his lack of self-knowledge (157-158). Similarly, Roy responds naturally to Iris's naked beauty yet will not reconcile himself to her special intercourse with time. In word and deed, Iris synthesizes “the life we learn with and the life we live with after that” (158). In body she manifests a fecundity that is both youthful and mature: “From above her hips she looked like a girl but the lower half of her looked like a woman” (162). Knowing or sensing that what Memo withholds out of niggling self-interest Iris gives freely in grace and joy, Roy feels “never so relaxed in sex” until Iris tells him that she is a grandmother (163). Repulsed almost to the point of physical withdrawal, Roy continues in a way that transforms what began as an act of love into rape.¹⁷ Iris knows that she will become pregnant if their intercourse is unprotected and tries to ask Roy if he is using a prophylactic. The Natural refuses to be interrupted in the midst of his pleasure: “he shoved her back and went on from where he had left off” (163). Roy uses Iris to gratify the sexual desire that Memo thwarts, then rejects the older woman because the circumstances of her life remind him too intimately of his own relatively advanced age (to be playing the boy's game) and the passing of his season on earth. Although Iris pleases him in body, Roy ignores her essential self and its wisdom; he defers reading her letter and focuses instead on what he views as her “symbolic” meaning, which confronts the Natural with the simple fact of his own mortality. To Roy, accepting Iris as his mate seems not fitting and proper but equivalent to resigning himself to grandfatherhood, a status he considers proof of decrepitude. Roy rejects this conception of himself, for “he personally felt as young and frisky as a colt. That was what he told himself as the train sped east, and … he fell into a sound sleep and dreamed how on frosty mornings when he was a kid the white grass stood up prickly stiff and the frozen air deep-cleaned his insides” (165). Roy's insistence on his own virility, like the image of the train and the dream of his younger self, ought to be familiar by now, and their relevance to his attitude toward Iris should be self-evident. Roy is 34 years old, an age that marks him as Iris's rightful mate and a mismatched paramour of Memo, but his maniacal fear of submitting to time's irrevocable scheme tears him from the embrace of (grand)mother and wife and delivers him again into the hands of the bitch-goddess. Considering the relatively late stage at which the above reiteration occurs, one concludes that Roy Hobbs will remain forever behind his time even as he chases it. One can hardly read these lines as anything other than a sign that Roy will never disembark from “the train going nowhere” (157) nor free himself from an emotionally fascistic Memo(ry).

Indeed, Roy acts almost compulsively on the basis of chronophobia and conjugal delusion. To the extent that he is aware of these flaws but unable to correct them, Roy's failures seem sympathetic, and the reader feels more acutely the conclusion's unhappy effect. The case, however, is more precisely that Roy has a clear sense of his delusions and anxieties but does not attempt to subdue them in any way that would require him to control his appetites for sex, money, or food, or to surrender his obsessions with youth and time. Even when he suspects the truth or is confronted with a sign of it, Roy turns back to his phobias and presumptions, believing that he can, by sheer force of will, wrest error into the outward shape of rectitude. This process is displayed most dramatically when, at a late stage of events, Roy envisions a tableau of an idyllic home life:

His heart ached the way he yearned for [Memo] (sometimes seeing her in a house they had bought, with a redheaded baby on her lap, and himself going fishing in a way that made it satisfying to fish, knowing that everything was all right behind him, and the home-cooked meal would be hot and plentiful, and the kid would carry the name of Roy Hobbs into generations his old man would never know. …

It later struck him that the picture he had drawn of Memo sitting domestically home wasn't exactly the girl she was. The kind he had in mind, though it bothered him to admit it, was more like Iris seemed to be, only she didn't suit him.

[179-180]

Having centered his vision of home on Memo, Roy quickly realizes which part of the picture does not fit its frame and who should take Memo's place. Roy's insight, as accurate as it is, does not effectively bring him any closer to wisdom, for he neither alters his behavior nor revises the terms of his ambitions. Roy's vision here is conventional, another permutation of the American icons he adopts throughout the narrative, yet it might liberate him from the enticements of ego and the gratifications of his monstrous appetites, to say nothing of his fear of death, if he could share it with the right partner. The image of Roy as the Natural restored to the land and its elemental pursuits promises a more auspicious future than the figure of the athlete greedy for success, trapped on the train whose destination recedes at its approach. Most of all, the possibility of a child evokes the crucial exchange of vital power from father to son (or daughter) that is traditionally associated with the generational continuities of baseball and the progress of its seasons. And yet, despite these procreative signs, Roy's vision is delusional, occurring as it does within a parenthesis of present longing for a sterile woman with a “sick breast” (124). Roy thinks of Memo as a trophy and of possessing her as the compensation due him for the time and rewards (of money, pleasure, and fame) that he has lost, but this conception, like Roy's visualizations of the sepulchral farmhouse and the boy and his dog who haunt the woods, is finally substanceless. The bracketed “Memo” of the quoted passage is a clarifying substitution for the less-definite “her” that appears in Malamud's text; the essentially anonymous pronoun suggests that Roy half-expunges his dream girl even as he tries to force her involvement in his self-indulgent vision. Memo's virtual absence here, in the image of a home designed to enshrine her, will strike the attentive reader as an irony that operates at Roy's expense, for it is Iris Lemon who has already anticipated Roy's image of a prospective home in her own moment of inspired foresight.

While Iris and Roy are swimming in Lake Michigan, Roy dives underwater and does not surface for some time. When his disappearance has lasted so long that it feels like abandonment, Iris recalls her original motivation in connecting with him: that she wanted to share his life because he was “a man who had suffered.” In the next moment, Iris envisions a future that seems to her already lost: “She thought distractedly of a home, children, and him coming home every night to supper. But he had already left her …” (160). Iris's instincts about Roy are correct. As surely as he might have established a home with her, so too does he abandon her before this process can properly begin. Iris's faith sustains her, however, and her sympathetic vision of home inscribes Iris as a real presence in Roy's life despite his reflexive impulse to exclude her. Iris's “fat letter” bulging in his suit pocket provides a reminder so weighty it is almost like companionship (165). This letter, which tells of Iris's efforts to be a good mother to her illegitimate daughter and to provide the child with a home in spite of having been banished from her father's house, is very much the example of “how to live” that Roy has sought. He chooses, however, not to read the letter until he has already taken bribe money to throw the playoff game. Iris's profession of faith reaches Roy too late.

Iris subsequently re-enters Roy's life, but her second coming is similarly belated. Too late to teach Roy “how to live” in his second life, Iris reappears soon enough to complete the displacement of Memo that begins when Iris first stands up for Roy at Wrigley Field. When Roy sees Iris again, long after the episode at the lake, he feels “an odd disgust for Memo. It came quickly, nauseating him” (225). Now, after having injured her with a foul ball he has struck intentionally and in malice (to silence the imprecations of Otto Zipp), Roy finally participates in Iris's vision of home and understands the redemption he would find there. Learning that Iris is pregnant, Roy accedes completely, his gestures a sign of his commitment: “he kissed her mouth and tasted blood. … He kissed her hard belly, wild with love for her and the child” (225). Unfortunately for Roy Hobbs, his time is already past and his future will remain unfulfilled, as Iris apprehends when she likens him to her first seducer/rapist, the father of her daughter (225). In spite of her eerie sense of recapitulated abuse, Iris is ready to forgive Roy and accept him as her husband. Roy's transgressions, however, have already placed him beyond the practical limits of forgiveness. The Natural has sold out to the Judge's money and Memo's sex, prostituting himself for superficial rewards and violating a culture's chief claim on its heroes: the integrity of their trials. The possibility of reconciliation vacates the Gethsemane of the enclosed green field; “home plate [lies] under a deepening dusty shadow” even as Roy perceives the metaphysical stakes of this baseball game and his performance in it: “A hit, tying up the game, would cure what ailed him. Only a homer, with himself scoring the winning run, would truly redeem him” (230). Desperate for redemption, Roy watches a fog of memory gather around the young relief pitcher sent in to strike him out, just as he vanquished the Whammer in that golden moment when the train briefly stopped and Roy Hobbs achieved a performative ideal commensurate with his natural abilities. Now an old god who has outlived his time, a false hero who has betrayed his acolytes, Roy is bereft of both preter-Natural and ordinary power. At the end, he is a decrepit Natural on the verge of exile, an exhausted ballplayer able only to gesticulate feebly in the descending gloom.

Failure and death are a common ending of modern novels. The implicit presupposition is that such a resolution more closely resembles real life, as most of us presumably experience it, than the “old-fashioned” happy ending, which has come to seem like a falsification or contrivance of fiction fit only for children, cowards, and fools. Yet only the most unregenerate cynic would claim that life always turns out badly, and only the most alienated critic would insist on a catastrophic finish. Most readers can imagine a measure of hope, a glimpse of a new day replete not necessarily with grace but with a chance to find or create a sense of grace amidst suffering. One need not be immature or craven or weak of mind to see the beauty of such a vision. Something like it ought to be possible for Roy Hobbs, despite the appointed completion of the mythic pattern that tends to force his defeat (CAF 338-340). If Roy is to be held responsible for his failures and transgressions (Pifer 151), so too should he be allowed to remediate them, or at least to exercise freedom of choice (and a free will) as he attempts to mend his ways. To deny Roy a meaningful possibility of personal reformation is to diminish his stature, to make him less like a man (to say nothing of a hero) and more like a clay figure shaped and manipulated by his author's determined hands. Even if one claims that Roy is not intended to be a realistic character in a realistic novel, but rather an archetypal figure in a prose romance, the mixed genre of The Natural suggests that the generic ending of Romance—homecoming and marriage—is as valid for the story as the irony and despair of its endgame. Either way, the protagonist ought to have an effective option that would enable him to escape what seems to be a predestined doom. Instead, Roy Hobbs understands only one regrettable truth and envisions only a grim future: “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again” (236). The epigraph to Howards End—“‘Only connect’”—pertains literally to the beaten hero of Bernard Malamud's baseball romance and to that hero's thwarted quest. At his life's decisive moments, Roy Hobbs must “only connect”—with Iris Lemon, with the two-strike pitch—to avoid reliving a desultory exile, to confer on his performances a meaning that transcends the rough beauty of the baseball diamond, to enter a future free of the burden of ancient suffering. Roy's inability to connect in crucial situations condemns him to re-enact, in a more public arena and at greater length, his earlier triumph over the Whammer and ensuing ignominy at the hands of Harriet Bird. Whatever else they might signify, these missed connections resist the conventional movement of Romance toward reunion and precipitate a tragic ending. Roy Hobbs strives mightily for self-vindication, trying to undo in a single-season career the fatal error of his youth. Gesturing repeatedly homeward to define an image of himself apart from baseball, Roy is powerless either to attain the conventional notion of home that he mistakenly conceives at the heart of its absence, or to recuperate the semblance of his younger self that haunts him from the shadows of a forest, in the spaces of a dream.

Notes

1. Christian K. Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 336. Cited as CAF.

2. Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952; reprinted, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 158. Quotations and references follow this edition.

3. In “Malamud's Unnatural The Natural” in Studies in American Jewish Literature 7: 2 (1988): 138-152, Ellen Pifer uses Hawthorne's remarks on Romance to explain the narrative's “‘unnatural’ landscape, the deliberate design … a network of seemingly magical events, interlocking images, linguistic motifs … [that distance] the reader from the novel's setting and characters” (138). Pifer argues that Malamud “[grafts] postmodernist techniques to a deeply rooted moral vision” to propose that, despite the ambiguities of human perception, the individual's moral sense is innate and, therefore, always accountable for the behavior it permits (151).

4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850), reprinted in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novels (Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun), edited by Millicent Bell (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 149. Quotations and references follow this edition and are cited parenthetically by title and page number.

5. See Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1957): “[T]he romance, following distinctly the medieval example, feels free to render reality in less volume and detail. It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality. … In American romances it will not matter much what class people come from, and where the novelist would arouse our interest in a character by exploring his origin, the romancer will probably do so by enveloping it in mystery. Character itself becomes, then, somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some romances that it seems to be merely a function of plot. The plot we may expect to be highly colored. Astonishing events may occur, and these are likely to have a symbolic or ideological, rather than a realistic, plausibility. Being less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely veer toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms” (Chase 13).

6. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; reprinted, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), for the separableness of the Romance and its continuity with the Novel: “The prose romance, then, is an independent form of fiction to be distinguished from the novel and extracted from the miscellaneous heap of prose works now covered by that term. … “Pure” examples of either form are never found; there is hardly any modern romance that could not be made out to be a novel, and vice versa. … It may be asked, therefore, what is the use of making the above distinction, especially when, though undeveloped in criticism, it is by no means unrealized. … ¶ The reason is that a great romancer should be examined in terms of the convention he chose” (Anatomy 305).

7. Some critics disagree. See Gerry O'Connor's “Bernard Malamud's The Natural: ‘The Worst There Ever Was in the Game’” in Arete 3:2 (Spring 1986): 37-41, for a “realistic” approach to The Natural.

8. Earl R. Wasserman's seminal article, “The Natural: Malamud's World Ceres” in The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences 9:4 (1965): 438-460, is the earliest complete discussion of these sources and their respective impacts on the novel. Wasserman's explication is so thorough that subsequent efforts to uncover analogues and allusions are obliged to acknowledge its precedence and then address minor items.

9. Malamud's choice of baseball truly seems a “natural” when one considers that baseball's ultimate origin is the ball-and-stick rituals performed annually in ancient Egypt. These rituals, part of the fertility rites overseen by the priest-kings, involved a mock combat in which opposing sides would vie for possession of and eventually dismember an effigy of Osiris, then ceremoniously bury the pieces in a gesture intended to restore the vital spirit to the dormant land. The head of the effigy acquired special significance because it was believed to be the most powerful part of the human body and consequently became a symbol for the spirit of fertility generally associated with Osiris. The object of the ritual combat became to capture the head of the god and return it safely to his temple—to bring it “home.” See Cordelia Candelaria, Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 7-14. See also Robert W. Henderson, Ball, Bat, and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games (1947; reprinted, Detroit; Gale Research, 1974). Modern baseball recapitulates many of these ancient patterns, especially that of seasonal rebirth, growth, maturity, and demise, the climactic passages of the Fall Classic now splendidly lit by harvest moons. Malamud seems well aware of baseball's Egyptian origin, for the description of Roy Hobbs's body indicates that the ballplayer is a modern incarnation of the dismembered Osiris: “Investigation showed he had no appendix—it had long ago been removed along with some other stuff. (All were surprised at his scarred and battered body.)” (192).

10. These views, in whole or in part, can be found in the following works: Candelaria, Seeking the Perfect Game; Messenger, Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction; Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868-1980 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982); Wiley Lee Umphlett, The Sporting Myth and the American Experience: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975); Wasserman, “Malamud's World Ceres”; David A. Jones and Leverett T. Smith, “Jack Keefe & Roy Hobbs: Two All-American Boys” in Aethlon 6:2 (Spring 1989): 119-137; Robert Shulman, “Myth, Mr. Eliot, and the Comic Novel” in Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1966-1967): 395-403; Jonathan Baumbach, “The Economy of Love” in Kenyon Review 25:3 (Summer 1963), as reprinted in Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 21-36; Frederick W. Turner, “Myth Inside and Out: Malamud's The Natural” in Novel 1:2 (1968): 133-139; Daniel Walden, “Bernard Malamud, An American Jewish Writer and His Universal Heroes” in Studies in American Jewish Literature 7:2 (1988): 153-161.

11. Jacques Barzun's famous line, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game,” appears in God's Country and Mine (1954).

12. See Norman Podhoretz, “Achilles in Left Field,” Commentary (March 1953): 321-326: “Malamud would like us to think that his hero's defect is a classic case of hubris, [but] his failure to make the sense of pride concrete … is a tip-off that he no more believes in the tragedy of pride than we do. … Appetite, nothing more, is Roy's tragic flaw” (326). Podhoretz argues that The Natural is a failed tragedy (325). See also Harvey Swados, “Baseball à la Wagner: The Nibelung in the Polo Grounds,” in American Mercury 75:346 (October 1952), as reprinted in Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud, edited by Joel Salzberg (Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1987), 23-25. Swados focuses on themes of tragic heroism, hero-worship, and the effects of the lingoistic prose style; he, too, judges the book a failure.

13. Wiley Lee Umphlett states that Roy “spends fifteen years in the bush leagues before making the big time” and that “Roy's years as a minor leaguer are integral to interpreting and understanding the meaning and interrelationship of the two major divisions of the story” (Umphlett 158). To be slightly more precise, Roy's “fifteen years in the bush leagues” are not “integral” to understanding anything because they have not occurred. As Roy tells Pop Fisher, he has recently returned to baseball and has been playing with the Oomoo Oilers, a semipro team. Before that, Roy was a high school ballplayer but, by his own account, has not played professional baseball (what Pop calls “organized baseball”) prior to joining the Knights (The Natural 48). Thus, the natural has never been a busher. Roy does not provide a detailed account of what he has been doing between the day Harriet Bird shot him down and the day he picks up baseball again, but his prowess as a hitter makes an extended bush league rustication incredible. The shape of Roy's life during the lost fifteen years—literally, his “buried life”—may be inferred from several allusions to the trouble he's seen; see The Natural, 52, 120-121, 156-158. Like Jay Gatsby, Roy's past is an enigma to his casual admirers, who are more than willing to script his history themselves; see The Natural, 103-104, and The Great Gatsby, edited by Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36, 40-41, 49, 52-53.

14. See Umphlett 163: “The sense of aloneness that was a unique part of his lost boyhood is an essential part of the real quest of Roy Hobbs.”

15. Wiley Lee Umphlett attributes Roy's ultimate failure to a conflict of native innocence, “as suggested by the novel's recurring references to the forest and his lost boyhood, and the confrontation of experience that the challenge of his goal demands” (Umphlett 158).

16. As a child, Roy seems to have lived first with his grandmother and then in various orphanages (32); his father, claims Sam Simpson, was a semipro ballplayer “who wanted awful bad to be in the big leagues” (35-36).

17. When Roy recalls this moment, his language indicates that the rough culmination (“him banging her”) of the act is discontinuous with its romantic, even sentimental prelude: “he remembered her pretty face and the brown eyes you could look into and see yourself as something more satisfying than you were, and … Iris swimming down in the moonlit water searching for him, and the fire on the beach, she naked, and finally him banging her. For some reason this was the only thing he was ashamed of, though it couldn't be said she hadn't asked for it” (187).