Disappointments

If you admire fiction and consider it at its best richer than philosophy and novelists as the true historians of the present, but, like me, find yourself easily resisting contemporary novels, the reason, I believe, is that recent novels no longer do many of the things that once made them so glorious.
--Joseph Epstein, "What Happened to the Novel?"  (Commentary, May 2020)

I recently finished Ann Napolitano's Dear Edward (The Dial Press, 2020) and was disappointed, as I often am with contemporary novels; in spite of some graceful MFA writing the overall effect is one of blandness and a lack of passion and precision, with a considerable amount of manipulation.  Edward, twelve-years-old, is the only survivor of an airplane crash in which his parents and older brother die.  There are alternating chapters of the plane trip and after Edward's survival, as he comes to grips with what has happened to him. The novel deals with the life of an orphan who goes to live with his uncle and aunt and touches on everything after the crash, including an avalanche of letters from relatives of those who died in the crash and want, in most cases, for Edward to do something in memory of one of the 191 victims.  None of the characters, including Edward and the girl next door(literally), ever quite come to life.

The other disappointment this week was the KBO (Korea Baseball Organization) broadcasts on ESPN.  The stadiums were empty and the umpires wore masks and the level of play was not too bad, so I thought it might help me to stop missing baseball as much as I do, which is much less than I had expected to..  The camerawork was worse even then U.S. television, to the extent it was sometime hard to tell what was going on, and the announcers --the games I've watched so far had Karl Ravech and Eduardo Perez -- were woefully unprepared and had little to say about Korean baseball and its history and differences and similarities with the American game.  Rather Ravech and Perez talked mostly what they thought might happen in this country, conversing with guests about American baseball while the Korean game went on, mostly uncommented on, on the side.