The Natural
A Novel
ISBN10: 0374502005
ISBN13: 9780374502003
Trade Paperback
256 Pages
$18.00
CA$24.00
The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, is also the first—and some would say still the best—literary novel written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, takes on very different material—the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and invests it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades after the novel's publication, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."
Reviews
Praise for The Natural
"A brilliant and unusually fine novel."—The New York Times
"A preposterously readable story about life."—Time
"Malamud [holds a] high and honored place among contemporary American writers."—The Washington Post Book World
"The finest novel about baseball since Ring Lardner left the scene."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
The Natural
PRE-GAME
Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was...