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The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.

J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

by Robert Coover, introduction by Ben Marcus

$17.95
$17.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Literature in English
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J. Henry Waugh is an unhappy accountant, a frequent patron of his local watering hole, and a fan of country music. He’s also the sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, currently entering its fifty-sixth season. Waugh is getting a little weary of his game—a game of dice, numbers, names, and other forms of accountancy—when a rookie pitcher, Damon Rutherford, comes around to restore his faith in the meaning of it all. But then tragedy strikes in this comic novel, a roll of the dice that imperils the whole association, which can only be redeemed by another tragedy—one set into motion by its heretofore unmoved mover, Mr. J. Henry Waugh.

Robert Coover’s second book is not so much about baseball as it’s played on the diamond as about the game that we play in our heads. The protagonist Coover creates is an all-American escapist à la Walter Mitty, out of touch with the world around him, but he is, besides that, and like the novelist, a creator and destroyer of worlds.

A box of nested narratives and stylistic tour-de-force, The Universal Baseball Association is an exploration of various national pastimes—not least among them a capacity for denial so limitless it can only be called optimism.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230182
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

One of the best baseball novels...Right from the start the book nearly matches On the Road for sheer electricity....There is something terrifying about the U.B.A., but as with all tragedy it is a terror that once seen, and lived through, yields a stronger sense of being alive.
—Matt Weiland, The New York Times

Robert Coover is one of the most original and exciting writers around. Every new book from him is great news.
—Edwidge Danticat, McSweeney's

Coover adds his dazzling two bits to the deconstructionist turf Paul Auster prowled in The New York Trilogy.
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

[A] brilliant parody of noir and hardboiled fiction and film.
—Michael Lipkin, New York Journal of Books

Right from the start the book nearly matches On the Road for sheer electricity . . . Coover made baseball on the page seem three-dimensional, exulting in what he called the game's 'almost perfect balance between offense and defense.' He captured what Philip Roth, in a 1973 New York Times essay on baseball, called 'its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters,' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium'. . . The genius of the novel is in how Coover revels in the sun-bright vitality of the world Waugh has created, full of drink and lust and dirty limericks and doubles down the line – and yet brings Waugh face to face with its darkest truths.
—The New York Times Book Review

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