you know me al

by Ring Lardner

Still hilarious. Lardner ever-so-skillfully allows our hero, rookie pitcher Jack Keefe, to unwittingly reveal himself and his acquaintances in his letters home to his pal Al.

This book works on several levels. You can read it for the baseball, or for the humor, or just as a great piece of writing. For the baseball lover it's red meat. Jack Keefe plays against Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and other greats of Lardner's time. Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, is a prominent character. I was happily struck by the many respects in which baseball hasn't changed since 1914.

But one needn't love or even understand baseball to enjoy the book. My old Scribner's paperback includes an introduction by son John Lardner, who quotes Virginia Woolf: "With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us."

Can Lardner be viewed as the American counterpart of P G Wodehouse?
Discuss. :-)

Favorite quote, this one from friend AS:

[Speaking of Walter "The Big Train" Johnson, one of the greatest fastball pitchers of all time] . . . he asked me what I thought of Johnson. I says I don't think so much of him. . . . He says What was the matter with Johnson's work? I says He ain't got nothing but a fast ball. Then he says Yes and Rockefeller ain't got nothing but a hundred million bucks. (p. 57)

My favorite:

Babys is great stuff Al and if I was you I would not wait no longer but would hurry up and adopt 1 somewheres. (p. 156)

SPOILER ALERT *** Yes, Keefe has a fastball, but he's immature and ignorant, a rube, and arguably a sociopath, always blaming someone or something else for his failures, and frequently on the verge of busting someone in the jaw. Redemption comes about two thirds into the book, when little Al arrives, and it's love at first sight for Keefe. ***