Review: Bang the Drum Slowly

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not the book I thought it was, and that’s a good thing.

I’ve known about this one for a long time. My father knew Harris, and I assume from a quick check of Harris’s Wikipedia page that it was when they were both on the faculty at San Francisco State in the early 1960s. I even think the two of them played softball together, something my father did often and that I assume the baseball-inclined Harris did as well.

I thought this book was, more or less, Brian’s Song for baseball. It’s no spoiler to say that our narrator’s roommate and possible best friend, Bruce Pearson, is dying. We learn it in the opening pages of the book if not from the back-cover copy. It’s an old story, A.E. Housman’s athlete dying young.

Brian’s Song was that necessary TV movie of my childhood, the one artistic statement (with the possible exception of a half-generation earlier’s Old Yeller) where boys were permitted, even encouraged to cry. It too was about a pair of friends, one of them dying.

This, it turns out, is much subtler, and, as a result, much more interesting.

Our narrator, Henry Wiggen, is a top left-handed pitcher in the majors. As a young man, he wrote a best-selling memoir – Harris’s earlier novel, “The Southpaw,” – which has earned him the nickname of Author. Bruce, who’s not especially bright (I’d love to see how Robert DeNiro played him in the 1973 film), insists instead on calling him Arthur.

Henry is at first the only one who knows about Bruce’s condition, and he agrees to hide it. At first, it’s a mercenary kindness. While Henry is a star, Bruce is a journeyman catcher. If word gets out that he’s sick, he’ll get cut and lose his livelihood. So Bruce covers for him, eventually negotiating a hardball contract that prohibits management from splitting the two roommates up. If one gets traded or released, the other has to as well.

Over time, though, it becomes clear that part of Henry’s motivation in hiding the truth is that he cannot really understand what it means to die. Bruce is starting to understand it, but Bruce has limited capacity to articulate much about experience.

For a long time, then, Henry denies the fact of death. He can do that, first, because he’s young, and second, because he’s a baseball player. Every day is a new start. There’s no such thing as history that extends before the first inning. It’s a game of spring – when the novel opens but, in many ways, always – and it’s a game of perpetual revival.

And that’s the ultimate beauty and power of this book. Henry is bright, funny, and unrestrained. He spends as much time not talking about Bruce’s situation as talking about it. In a brilliant device, Harris introduces a writer character late in the book who reads the first couple chapters that Henry has already written of this book. And that’s his criticism: the book is not enough about Bruce, but rather about Henry and all the things he does in order not quite to face up to the fact of Bruce’s disease.

There are splashes of Bull Durham in this. The team is in a pennant race, but more importantly it’s a group of guys who know the game too well to forget it’s a game. They scam one another as well as star-struck fans. They deal with racism, inflicting it and enduring it, and they try to unify against a still all-powerful management.

As the season passes, word of Bruce’s condition leaks out. Within the team, it brings forth a spirit of quiet generosity. One of the biggest jerks on the team goes out of his way to keep the secret and be kind to Bruce, but it’s a kindness born of strength rather than tenderness. It’s moving and beautiful, but it’s quiet and blunt too.

As Henry figures out what’s going on, he both spends more time writing the book he feels called to write – with the writing of it part of the story as well – and with Bruce. He’s too unlearned to understand how every generation before his has dealt with death, but he’s too bright to imagine he’s the first one to experience the loss of someone he cares about.

The bottom line for all of that is that this book is funny. It’s not knee-slappingly so – and the transformation of the sport over the last quarter century likely makes it harder for people younger than mid-30s to understand some of the particulars of what he’s saying – but instead it’s gently so. Henry has a funny perspective on the world. Harris’s great ambition here is to compel that perspective to wrestle with death.

There’s no saving Bruce. We know that from the first chapter. But there is the chance to give him one more season, to draw things out and bang the drum slowly.

This may no longer be for everyone because the vernacular and references have aged, but I think it really is an exceptional novel. I’ve waited a long time to read this, and I may have come upon it at just the right moment.


View all my reviews