Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella

A novel about male wish fulfillment, W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982) is a kind of adult fairy tale about a man who obeys the injunction of a voice what whispers various messages. The most famous message is "If you build it, they will come." Ray Kinsella is the novel's main character. He has a wife named Annie and a young daughter named Karin and both are perfect. Despite the fact that he is on the verge of bankruptcy throughout the novel, when Ray tells Annie that he wants to use valuable acreage to build a baseball field, she agrees. Later when he tells her that he wants to take a tour of various famous baseball fields in the Midwest and east, she agrees again. She never doubts his most foolish plans, and he is full of them. But the nature of the novel is that foolish plans are often the right plans.

Kinsella clearly loves baseball and sees it as a metaphor for the American Dream. If you don't see the aptness of the analogy, then the novel will not work for you. If you don't believe that J. D. Salinger, the reclusive novelist, would allow himself to be talked into leaving his home with Kinsella in order to see a baseball field where the famous members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox come back to life to play baseball again, then the novel is not for you. Shoeless Joe requires one to suspend disbelief on all sorts of levels. If you can do that, the experience is entertaining and sometimes moving. I'm a sucker for any novel that depicts the reunion of a son with his long-dead father.

The makers of the film Field of Dreams (1989) significantly simplified the narrative of the novel. Several characters are dropped (Ray's twin brother and the oldest living Chicago Cub, Eddie Scissors, who rents the farm to Ray). This was probably a good decision as it allowed the filmmakers to focus on the story of the baseball stadium in the cornfield, of Ray's devotion to baseball. In the film, J. D. Salinger has a different name, and his character is played by James Earl Jones. This was probably mandated by the threat of lawsuits from Salinger, who doesn't like any kind of intrusion into his privacy.

Both novel and film suggest that modern America and baseball have been corrupted by commercialism and big business. The farm where Ray builds his baseball field, surrounded by the fields of corn, contrasts with the concrete and the hustle and bustle of the cities where major league baseball is played. In this sense, Shoeless Joe is a latter day agrarian novel that longs for the good old days when men aspired to play baseball for the pleasure and the glory of the game, not for a high salary. It hearkens back to an earlier, better time. It also suggests, improbably, that bankruptcy can be staved off just by wishful thinking.

I was moved by this novel, and angered by it as well. Its insistence on being naïve and sentimental, its willed romanticism, its fatuous notion that the past was somehow better than the present, doesn't work for me. Kinsella argues that dreams are more important than realities, but without realities, dreams can never come true. Americans place much stock in dreams. Perhaps this is one of the points of the novel. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Americans sometimes can't see themselves for who they are, and why the United States too often gets into trouble. It can't see its own dark side.