New to the Game
Modern men search for personal meaning in the musing short story collection New to the Game.
In Mark Schoedel’s quirky, ambitious short story collection New to the Game, men talk about their injuries, their families, and baseball.
The characters herein challenge versions of the status quo. In “Let’s Do Green Bay,” a father and son argue about getting ahead; the father is disdainful of the “Just smile and everything will come up roses” philosophy. In “Get Your Ass out of Bed,” a family’s habits enable a disabled war veteran’s self-destructive behavior until an uncle takes charge. But “Strangers Among Friends” begins in medias res, without identifying the speakers or the stakes of their stories, holding the audience at a distance; it is later revealed that what the characters have in common is their interest in baseball. Indeed, the tale is packed with allusions to twentieth-century baseball players that have limited meaning to those beyond the central exchange. This same esoteric quality arises in other exchanges, too, as in a conversation referencing “a forty in your hand.”
Many of the stories are conversation driven; some are made up of dialogue alone. In one tale, people discuss getting and using drugs; others’ concerns include finding a place to sleep for the night and sharing gossip about mutual acquaintances’ failures. Characters’ backstories are sparse, and people’s voices bleed together. The absence of dialogue tags is also an impediment in many of the tales, since the characters all have the same concerns and use similar language.
In “Black and White,” though, a rabbi and a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish man converse about the worries the young man’s mother has about his problems with women. Here, it’s clear who is speaking when and why. Hebrew words appear, supported by contextual clues and grounding the tale in a clear, particular context. Still, this tale is an exception in a collection where conversations rule and action is subdued, and whose plots feel underdeveloped as a result of the limited attention to life beyond the central exchanges.
Indeed, the stories have meandering narrative arcs on the whole. Their conflicts are too often static, and many are unresolved at the stories’ ends. The exceptions are those stories in which men change through their conversations with their family members and close friends. Still, there’s a lot of one-upmanship in their exchanges. Even when the speakers fall short of being vulnerable with their family members, though, they make important gestures, opening their hearts somewhat to the people they love or resent.
The dialogue-driven stories collected in the musing collection New to the Game center men in search of meaning.
Reviewed by
Michele Sharpe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
