There Is A Whole World In ‘The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.’

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives little clue as to what could happen inside its cover. Behind the title there are several misshapen die with colorful dots and crumbling edges. It is a strange book, with a strange protagonist, and a sentence structure so mesmerizing that I couldn’t put it down. When I picked up this book, I had no understanding of it except that it was “about baseball.” But the book isn’t about baseball, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s about a version of baseball that exists only in the mind of the book's protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, who lives alone in an apartment, neglects his job as an accountant, and has pastrami sandwiches delivered to him so that he can spend all of his time working as the commissioner of a baseball league he has made up in his vivid imagination. Each game is played with die rolls that determine how a batter performs at the plate and what happens to the ball. The keys have been built over decades of play by himself. The teams themselves have backstories, difficulties, and histories. There are events that exist inside the world of the league that are not real and yet impact the behavior of the players, who are also not real. There are songs that Henry has written for the league, up-and-coming stars, and a Hall of Fame he keeps meticulously in a book on his shelf. This kind of world creation is similar to the work of creating a novel. You as the creator invent people and give them problems. You build out a world for them to exist in and hope that they behave in certain ways. At some point, you forget that you’ve made it all up, that none of these people are real, that if one of them is behaving in a way that does not function narratively, you can simply make them do something else, or delete them from the story altogether. The work of creation of any kind is often dangerously close to the work of disassociation from the world you actually live in, and Coover displays this with terrifying, mesmerizing clarity.