FICTION
‘Nostalgia’
By Dennis McFarland
Pantheon, $25.95, 322 pages
Football, observed the late comedian George Carlin, is a metaphor for war.
With “bombs” and “bullet passes,” the “field general” wins by advancing troops into enemy territory. But in baseball, “the object is to go home and to be safe,” he said.
“A 19th-century pastoral game,” baseball is played in spring — the season of life, while the “20th century industrial struggle” of football begins in autumn, when nature is dying.
Author Dennis McFarland artfully incorporates baseball and its many allegorical implications into his Civil War novel, “Nostalgia,” an ambitious contemplation of warfare and homecoming. In finely crafted prose with an ear for antiquated language, McFarland’s historical narrative unpacks the bittersweet paradox of “home” as a source for both comfort and pain.
In a subtle nod to “The Red Badge of Courage,” “Nostalgia” begins with a youthful Union soldier resting by a stream — but the similarities end there. It’s May 1864, and Pvt. Summerfield Hayes has been abandoned by his regiment after a grisly firefight. He wanders half-deaf and dehydrated through a primordial Virginia forest, convinced he’s being shadowed.
As Hayes’ exile in the wilderness grows more surreal and sinister, flashbacks of home reveal how this “naked fool in the woods,” as he puts it, got “lost and deserted without so much as a hat.” We gradually learn that the 19-year-old bookworm and pitcher in Brooklyn’s formative Eckford Club had no business joining the Army of Potomac in the first place. Anti-war sentiment ran high at home, especially for his older sister, Sarah, who was still reeling from the death of their parents. Hayes enlisted in the 40th New York Volunteers to retreat from his own conflicted emotions and an uncomfortable domestic development.
Hayes spends the hallucinatory first act of “Nostalgia” stumbling through scorched fields and boiling swamps, assailed by threats that may or may not be imaginary. His thoughts naturally return to happier times, including a ball game he’d organized not long after joining the army. Recalling the tournament between Company D’s Twighoppers and the Bachelors, Hayes elevates a singular April afternoon of “merry chaos” into the stuff of legend. His reverence borders on religiosity.
McFarland’s worship for the quaint peculiarities of the sport in its nascent years resonates in these flashbacks. Flirting with self-indulgence, he works in the construction demands of “base balls” (rubber overshoes were boiled, wrapped with yarn, then covered with horsehide), the invention of “speedballs” and “dew-drops,” and many curious rule idiosyncrasies sure to amuse modern loyalists.
All this may sound like inside baseball — and Hayes’ reveries do sometimes stretch into extra innings. But the author effectively juxtaposes the pastoral and imagined purity of baseball with the horrors of modern warfare. When combat erupts, “a human roar like nothing Hayes had ever heard descended on them slowly from their right, burgeoning down the earthworks like a locomotive coming into a station.”
When Hayes awakens from his fever dream in a crowded military hospital, the novel’s second act becomes a different sort of war story. Exhausted, suffering from memory loss and suspected of being a deserter, Hayes mysteriously can’t speak or hold a pen steady enough to write. A doctor calls his condition “nostalgia,” an affliction common among soldiers. Contemporary readers may recognize Hayes’ symptoms as post-traumatic stress disorder, but that terminology wasn’t invented for another century.
When he learns that soldiers with nostalgia are typically institutionalized, Hayes begins scheming about escaping the ward and finding a way home to Sarah. He’s soon assisted by Walt, a sympathetic gray-haired gentleman who comes and reads him Dickens novels every day. The stranger — spoiler alert — turns out to be Walt Whitman.
McFarland’s selection of the “Leaves of Grass” poet may seem confounding at first, another fantasy player in an increasingly indulgent bullpen. But the author’s scholarship is sound: The real-life Whitman volunteered in Union hospitals and brought gifts to wounded soldiers. He was also an admirer of baseball. “It’s our game, the American game,” he wrote. “It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.”
As the novel steals toward the inevitable homecoming suggested by its title (and sports references), we begin to question if “the American game” can repair Hayes’ losses, at least in any lasting sense.
If baseball is about returning home, "Nostalgia" reminds us that the "safe" zone may not be so comfortable after all. Its characters learn that the tips of diamonds can be sharp and dangerous. As the novel's epigraph notes, the term "nostalgia" derives from Greek: nostos, "return home," and algos, "pain."
What’s never in doubt is McFarland’s talent for crafting intricate fiction. In chapters that are elegiac, well-plotted and emotionally rich, the novel swings for the fences. It’s not exactly a home run, but “Nostalgia” handily lands more hits than strikes.
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