Canter Bridge

It’s difficult to imagine a more unlikely book concept. And *impossible* to absorb the luck of its timing.

Two novelists, quite unlike each other except for their deep-structure attachment to the Boston Red Sox, trade emails over the course of a 162-game baseball season, supplemented–dramatically, gorgeously, gloriously–by a post-season that must be acknowledged as one of the all-time finest moment in sports.

Back when some working stiff in an editor’s office at Scribner’s wrote the functional equivalent of ‘Yeah, I guess we could do that …’, nobody could have suspected that the season during which horror-fiction monarch Stephen King and Fine Young Novelist Stewart O’Nan would begin trading emails at the onset of Spring Training would end up being the now incomparable (for Red Sox fans) ‘2004’.

You see, Sox fans abbreviate calamity by the numbers: 1949, 1967, 1986, 1993 … These are the numerals that circumscribe the domain in which Disaster has sunk its tentacles deep into the soul of the long-suffering citizens of Red Sox Nation.

‘2004’ is another number, but so very, very different from all others. It gives its numerical title to the chapter in which Boston broke the long-standing Curse of the Bambino (so named by Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, who gets no love in this book). What is more, the baseball gods allowed that 2004 would break the Curse in the most improbable fashion, climaxing on a cold October night in the heart of the Evil Empire when the Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit to finish off the Hated Yankees in the location that would allow maximum vindicating juice to surge. The Sox sweep of the Cards in the World Series is just an agreeable footnote to the Real Thing.

O’Nan’s obsessive, worrying prose dances with King’s ironic, wizened, lyrical notes to record each moment, each game, each this-is-going-to-kill-us-(again)-in-the-end moment of the Sox ‘Idiots’ season, when–finally–all bets were off. The guys know baseball and, for this reviewer, their almost daily exchanges take one deep and helpfully inside this Game of Small Things.

Each mortal on the Sox roster had his moment of apotheosis. O’Nan and King were there to register it in real time, all the while reminding themselves and each other that this could lead to nothing good. Yet it did: the Dauber, Manny, Big Papi, Pedro, the erstwhile misspelt ‘Mr. Schill’, ‘The Tragical Mr. Lowe’, the Moneyball-vindicating (or almost) Dave Roberts and his ALCS Game Six steal-while-the-whole-world-was-watching (with apologies to Chicago), Johnny Damon and his Disciples, Tek, Mystery Leskanik, a young and much-queried manager called ‘The Coma’ by his detractors …

On it went, chronicled day in and day out by Messieurs King and O’Nan while none of us imagined what was coming.

Let me be frank: you’ve got to be either a very serious fan of the game of baseball or a moderately serious Red Sox fan in order to love this book. Otherwise it’ll come off as a black hole of rather pitiful obsessive behavior, carried on by two men who have families and other matters that probably miss their attention.

But if you fit in one of those categories, you might just love this book.

‘2004’, after all, is no ordinary year for either of the classes of human being mentioned above. For Sox fans–full disclosure requires that this reviewer briefly flash his identity card–there can be no other like it. 2007 is a welcome appendix, but just that.

The Curse-of which King, at least, is a passionate doubter, as he is of most things that flow from the acid pen of a certain Mr. Shaugnessy–was broken that year and nothing, in consequence, will ever be the same. For some, the descent from high drama to ordinary baseball has been a bitter pill to swallow. In candid moments, we kind of miss the suffering. A little.

King and O’Nan take us back to a time when Everything Mattered and No Good was likely to come of any of it. Yet it did, Did it ever!

The unabridged audiobook version is expertly read by Adam Grupper and Ron McLarty.