Volume 20, Number 9 · May 31, 1973
The Sporting News
By William H. Gass
The Great American Novel
by Philip Roth
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 382 pp., $8.95
At this writing the St. Louis Cardinals have broken from the Great Gate like a lame horse, losing, with an ineptitude that is almost creative, fourteen of their first sixteen games, and one momentarily wonders whether the Ruppert Mundys, Philip Roth's imaginary clot of last placers, have come back from the season of '43, returned to the history from which they've been expunged, risen in new suits, new names, in another league and park, to malperform—pop, whiff, miss, muff, kick, fluff, boot, balk, drop, juggle, bobble, bean, spike, strand, fan, walk, overrun and underthrow, to butter-finger, squander, foul out, blow—miserably to flop, to botch (in the alliterative language of Roth's post-literate narrator, W. Smith), once more to fuck up, falter, fail, and finally to finish a faint and bitterly laughable last. The Cardinals even have a player with a beautifully Rothlike name, Scipio Spinks, who purports to pitch, and who has already lost four straight this season, probably because, it has been publicly surmised, someone stole his stuffed gorilla.
Review, 2193 words
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