[In the following review, Cheuse provides a positive assessment of Shoeless Joe, praising the “world of compelling whimsy” that Kinsella created in the novel.]

It was probably only a matter of time, one says with perfect hindsight, before the formation of the Canadian professional baseball franchises led to the appearance of a Canadian novelist with a penchant for writing about the peculiarly North American sport. So on the mound this spring we find W. P. Kinsella, formerly a short-story writer from Calgary in the Canadian leagues, pitching at us an utterly disarming, whimsical knuckler of a novel that won the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for 1982. It's called Shoeless Joe and it stands as fictional homage to our national pastime, with resonances so American that the book may be grounds for abolishing our northern border.

Ray Kinsella, the novel's narrator, appears to be a doppelganger of the author himself. This Kinsella also loves baseball, but he is U.S.-born and-bred, the son of a minor-league catcher, who, as the novel opens, has given up a lackluster job as an insurance salesman to run a farm outside Iowa City. In a characteristic vision, he hears a voice over a loudspeaker system tell him to build a replica of an old-fashioned baseball park on his property so that his all-time baseball hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson, pride of the Chicago White Sox before their great scandal, will return from the spirit world to cavort bare-toed across the newly mowed grass of left field.

Sure enough; Jackson does. And he brings the rest of his tarnished teammates along with him to play out under the lights dreamy narrator Kinsella's idea of paradise on earth.

The rest of the plot comes out of left field as well—Kinsella's next vision informs him that he must kidnap fiction writer and famous recluse J. D. Salinger and take him to a Red Sox game at Boston's Fenway Park. Off heads Ray to New England where he convinces a somewhat reluctant Salinger to join him in his quest for a perfect game. “I could never dream up a plot as bizarre as this,” the bemused writer says midway through their little odyssey as more and more ghosts out of times gone by emerge out of the dugout to warm up on the field.

But bizarre as it is, the plot leads the reader into, rather than distracts from, the nostalgic world of the American pastime and American times past. With rare skill, Kinsella turns his obsessions into metaphors of memory and emotion, convincing us, at least while we're reading his charming creation, that baseball and, yes, writing may be a lot more similar than they at first appear. “Baseball is a … ritual,” narrator Ray explains to author Salinger while the two are driving back to Iowa where they will participate in the further conjuring of sports heroes—and where one of them will himself become a willing spirit in a game with greater stakes, “Good writing is a ritual,” Ray goes on, “so many words or so many pages a day. You must know that. …”

Shoeless Joe in its ritual celebration of the game of baseball proves its author to be a writer worth further conjuring. A baseball book for this season, and perhaps many more to come, it takes its time to create a world of compelling whimsy; but then, as Roger Angell has written, baseball is mainly a matter of time.