Battle Creek; A Novel

New York: Rob Weisbach Books [An Imprint of William Morrow and Company, Inc.], 1999. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Ken Schles (Jacket photograph). [12], 265, [11] pages Signed by the author on the title page. Scott Lasser is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the Wharton School. His novels include Battle Creek and All I Could Get. His non-fiction has appeared in magazines ranging from Dealmaker (for which he wrote a regular book column) to The New Yorker. Lasser has worked for a variety of now-bankrupt companies, including the National Steel Corporation, Lehman Brothers, and Dealmaker Magazine. Scott Lasser has written a profoundly moving novel of fathers, sons, ambition, and honor, a novel that you will not soon forget. Scott Lasser's Battle Creek is a novel of America, heart-wrenchingly beautiful and compelling to the last page. To read it is to believe again in the simple things that make our souls strong: courage, faith, and the right to hold on to a dream, no matter how elusive. Gil Davison is the coach of an amateur baseball team in Michigan, national finalists many times over but champions never. He has spent his adult life juggling his roles as coach to the team, father to his estranged son, and caretaker to his own disapproving father--a man disdainful of Gil's passion for the game. Now, in this one season, Gil's star pitcher is losing his arm, his son has made it clear that he is doing just fine without him, and Gil's father is dying of cancer. So when a rookie hitter wanders into town--fresh from a stint in prison and determined to make a clean start--Gil convinces himself that the team must win the championship, their last chance to fulfill a long-standing dream. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: "Cigarettes and baseball. These are not unusual vices," thinks one of the middle American, late middle-aged characters in Lasser's powerful novel of thwarted lives. A bleak metaphor for middle-class dreams, the story imagines the defining effect one season of amateur baseball imposes upon the lives of a small group of players and their women. Now 60, Gil Davison gave up a promising baseball future three decades ago to placate his autocratic father, who considered his athletic achievements a waste of time. By way of vicarious engagement, and beginning with his own two sons, over the past 30 years Gil has become a coaching legend around the baseball fields of suburban Detroit. His star pitcher, 34-year-old stockbroker Ben Mercer, had two weeks in the big leagues with Baltimore. Nursing an arthritic elbow, the fastballing lady-killer has finally met a woman who is his match, and that's bad for his game. Vince Paklos, Gil's astute sidekick, had a meteoric month-long stint with a major league team. Chain-smoking his way through the final days of terminal emphysema, Vince needs money to keep his life insurance in force. Out on parole after serving five years for murder, at age 22 Luke James is a batting wonder who needs someone to find him a girl, pay his room and board and keep him out of jail. His team a perennial runner-up, idealistic Gil has always played by the rules in both life and ball, but he has never won the national championship held at Battle Creek. Luke's arrival comes at a critical time, and Gil's single-minded desire to earn the title becomes a matter of life or death when his 98-year-old father lies half-blind in a nursing home, sitting on money that's more than enough to make Gil's dream come true. First-time novelist Lasser's language favors honesty over musicality but the narrative, with its poignant and disturbing insights into father-son relationships and its acceptance of the frailty of the human condition, is completely engrossing.