The Celebrant: A Novel

What bothers me is the ending. Is it a lesson on the dangers of hero worship? Is it a coincidence that Jackie acts on the words of Mathewson after meeting him for only the second time? What if he hadn't gone to see him? I don't think he would have made the same decision. What did his action accomplish?

This is what really bothered me.
Eli had already been cut off from the family business-he wasn't going to take anyone else down with him. Tough love gone askew?
Was Jackie blindly following the words of Mathewson, or had Mathewson's mind created some twisted higher standard others should follow, unbeknownst to Jackie? This ending caught me offguard, especially after the lecture Arthur got about how valuable Eli was to the company in it's beginning, and he should be taken care of now. Am I not my brother's keeper? I guess not...

These questions aside, this is masterful writing. The World Series games come alive as never before. McGraw, Merkle, Snodgras, Hal Chase, and the fictional Kapinski family all intertwine in this splendid tale. What a movie this would make!


Diamonds Are Not Forever   December 27, 2002
 0 out of 2 found this review helpful

I agree with the comments of other five-star reviews I've read but think the surprise ending especially vivid and ironic. The author with the two-baseball-star name sets love and honesty in conflict. A moving morality tale that has history, comedy, and tragedy.


Not To Be Missed   March 5, 2002
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

There's a reason this book shows up on almost every list of the very best baseball books...it is. It works wonderfully at so many levels...from bringing the bawdy days of Mathewson and McGraw to life again...to a deeply searching examination of the price of hero worship....and a gripping narrative besides. Get this book and journey back in time...you'll find yourself in the crowd, cheering on Matty, "master of them all."


Best Baseball Novel   October 11, 2000
 10 out of 11 found this review helpful

I thought "The Natural" and the Kinsella books, "Shoeless Joe" and "The Iowa Baseball Confederacy" were just too dark and odd. Coover's "Universal Baseball Association" was so obsessive-compusive...

Until now, my favorite baseball novel was "If I Never Get Back", by Darryl Brock. This is a wonderful novel with a strong historical link to the 1869 Red Stockings, as the main character joins the Cincy team and travels with them throughout the East Coast and even off to San Fransisco. Add time travel, Mark Twain, buried treasure and a love interest, and this novel is a blast.

But I now have a new favorite.

"The Celebrant" by Erick Greenberg

I read about this book on various lists of great baseball books, but the plot always seemed to sound a bit weak. Well, it is a masterpiece. The research done by Greenberg to get the Mathewson baseball correct is sooo cool. From the details of the Merkle Boner to the Snograss Muff and the subsequent call-off of Merkle in favor of Chief Meyers by Matty... From Matty quitting in shame as manager of Cincinnatti after the Hal Chase debacle and enlisting for WWI to the Black Sox World Series of 1919. Game after game sounds like a current event. Very cool, very accurate stuff. This is early 20th century baseball as if you were there. Combine that with the insight into the title character's immigrant family and their establishment of their jewelry business and its intertwining with baseball. Add some wonderful prose. A true masterpiece.

Here's a favorite passage, describing Honus Wagner:

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"Honus Wagner matched Mathewson for size, and in the infield he stood like a gnarled oak with bowed roots, his large arms branching nearly to the ground; with his oversized hands, he'd scoop up anything hit to his enormous range, gathering with the ball a large measure of infield dirt, and he would fling the whole package toward first base, debris trailing off like a comet's tail, the toss ever straight and true."

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Another longer passage, on the difficulty of being Mathewson the hero. This was on the eve of Matty pitching the delayed game 7 of the 1912 World Seies at Fenway. All of the pressure of the failure of 1908 and the expectations of being Mathewson weigh on the great pitcher. Hugh Fullerton, the baseball writer, is talking to Kapp, the book's main character, who has just learned that Matty refers to him as the 'celebrant of his works' through his jewelry designs and gifts to the pitcher:

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"Have you ever considered what he is to himself? What it's like to be Christy Mathewson? Imagine it. You know perhaps five hundred people by name, but fifty million know you. You make no more than ordinary demands upon people; you don't insist that the sandwich you order for lunch be the most marvelous sandwich ever made, or that the bootblack's shine dazzle the blind, yet the sandwich-maker and the bootblack and millions like them expect the superhuman from you, and finally they'll accept nothing less. Expectation becomes demand, and it extends to everyone and everything. You hear the crowd groan if you give up a single hit; they expect a no-hit game. Give up a run and people say you're off your game. Even your teammates turn to you to save them after they foul up the simplest plays. The writers make you a standard of excellence, and if a rival wins nineteen games in a row you're expected to win twenty. The world makes you a god and hates you for being human, and if you plead for understanding it hates you all the more. Heros are never forgiven their success, still less their failure." ... Fullerton put on his hat. "Matty told me you were once a pitcher. I suspect that your [jewelry design] work is infused with the wish that you were he. You're not alone. Inside every sportswriter there's a frustrated athlete, according to the old saw. Why not? The same thing is inside every fan, or anyone who ever picked up a bat and a ball. But Kapp, you ought to thank God that your arm went bum. It might be you in Gethsemane tonight."

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Engrossing, richly detailed, and terribly haunting   October 14, 1999
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

Why are so many great baseball stories essentially tragic ones? This novel is the best baseball novel I've yet read, and I can understand how fans of the novel can consider it a religious experience. It's a story of worship, that most essential of human activities, a baseball fan's worship of the first true immortal of the game. Its details are rich without being overwhelming, its characterization classic and familiar but not trite. The dynamic between the celebrant--the jewel designer Jackie Kapinski--and the celebrated, Christy Mathewson, plays out like Greek myth or biblical narrative, and exposes the need for, and dangers of, someone to believe in.