I do not particularly like baseball (the sport is too slow for my taste) but nonetheless I decided to read Malamud's story The Natural, which is one of the two longer novels in this book. I started reading it with not much anticipation, even though I had liked some of Malamud's stories that I had read many years ago, while in college. It turns out that the story really caught me, and found I could not put the book down until I finished it, so exciting was the plot.

The story revolves mostly about a year in the life of a baseball player, Roy Hobbs, that was very promising as a young man. But inexplicably he was shot by a woman when he was only 19 years old, and his career was derailed. The story picks up about 15 years later, when he is "discovered" and joins a major league team, The Knights who play in New York. He is a great player, a natural, who can hit and catch like no other. Takes his team to the pennant but he is persuaded to throw a crucial game in the end and his team does not make it to the World Series.

All along, however, he has doubts about his life, about his relationship with women (it was a woman who shot him in his youth), and his ability to follow through. In the end, after he loses the last game he goes to the judge (part owner of the Knights) and throws back the money Roy took from him, and beats him up. But a newspaperman found out the Roy had fixed the game and it's published in the papers. Roy's life is ruined- his reputation is done for.

I can't capture the magnificent way in which Malamud narrates the games and the thinking and tribulations of Roy when he is playing. I think this is a book definitely worthwhile reading. ( )

This is a very good book that is not the story from the Robert Redford movie. There are some similarities but the tone of the book is completely different.
The book begins with Roy Hobbs as a 19 year old baseball player on his way to a major league tryout. On the train to Chicago he meets a woman who unknown to him has killed two star athletes. She lures him up to her room and shoots him, almost killing him, while laughing with glee. When we next see Roy Hobbs he is 35 years old and has just been signed by the New York Knights, a not very good major league baseball team. The only thing that remains from his childhood is his bat "Wonderboy" which he had carved from a tree that had been split by lightning.
He had spent 16 years going from one lousy job to another angry for what might have been. His suffering did not begin when he was 19. His mother had died when he was young and he spent a large part of his childhood in orphanages because his father was too lazy to take care of him. These experiences created a complex man whose interior life is the real story of the book.
Roy Hobbs tells his story through his actions and lengthy monologues that take the reader into a reality completely different from their day to day world. All of the details of life in the 1940's begin the transition. Roy's tale of his past adds to that. Idyllic daydreams of a boyhood he never had cover the loneliness and pain of an abused child. The ruin of his adult life created a burning desire to be the best there ever was. His emptiness gave rise to love for a beautiful woman whose greed became his destruction. When he finds true love he throws it away because of shallow ideals. In the end his greed and lust lead back to a life of suffering.
I read the book in two sittings and when I took a break it took a few minutes to escape from the world the author had taken me to. His excellent skill as a writer had entrapped me in a different place and time where I didn't feel or think the same. It was not a happy story but I learned something about people and life between the covers of a book. ( )