[ARETE] Scott Peterson's review of The Resisters

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Scott Peterson's review of *The Resisters*,
by Gish Jen.
Stay well
Thanks
Duncan

Review of *The Resisters*

Scott D. Peterson

University of Missouri—St. Louis



When Gish Jen appeared on stage with Emily Nemens at the Key West Literary
Seminar (KWLS) in January, the latter described *The Resisters *as an
“unbaseball baseball book.” As the writer of *The Cactus League*, another
baseball novel that appeared this spring, Nemens spoke with authority. Jen
described herself as “not a baseball fan,” but as someone “surrounded by
baseball.” Despite these descriptions that readers of sport literature
might find somewhat inauspicious, Jen’s book demonstrates a thorough
familiarity with the game’s history, culture, and the formula often used to
tell baseball stories. Jen acknowledged the formula’s advantages (she wrote
the book in a year) and drawbacks (the stigmas attached to genre fiction)
while recognizing that good sport literature is about more than “just
sports.” A recent mini-review in the *New Yorker* succinctly described the
book as “dystopian” and “speculative” fiction set in an “authoritarian
society divided between the Netted, who are privileged and fair skinned,
and the Surplus, who live in swamps or on water” (March 23, 2020, p. 61).
This description is accurate, but it leaves out the titular resistance, the
fact that baseball has to be brought back from dissolution to play a role
in that resistance, and the baseball fiction formula at the heart of the
book.



Readers of dystopian fiction will recognize the outlines of the world they
are dropped into when they open the book, yet they might be surprised when
the titular dissent is enacted by the game of baseball and its players. If
we like to scare ourselves with near-future fiction, Jen’s book delivers
here, too: Consuming is the only job of the Surplus, the disenfranchised
Resisters of her narrative. Humans have given “Aunt Nettie”—Jen’s version
of Siri or Alex—everything “she” needs to co-opt many elements of their
existence. Beyond mere listening in, houses in this future have become
characters to the point they talk back and tell their occupants what to do.
This singularity is so complete that Grant, the book’s narrator and father
of the protagonist, is out of a job as a university professor (talk about
hitting close to home). Perhaps scariest of all, Canada geese are *everywhere,
*and no one seems to know what to do about them.



Equally disturbing is the situation where baseball has fallen out of
fashion to the degree that it has to be played on the sly to avoid
detection by Aunt Nettie’s omnipresent drones and be brought back to
mainstream society by the coach of one of the few remaining universities.
Grant becomes one of the fathers of the game when he cobbles together a
device to allow his daughter Gwen and other Surplus children to participate
in the Underground Baseball League instead of consuming products and
services. (Somewhere, Henry Chadwick—the original Father of Baseball—is
weeping.) Gwen identifies the Surplus dilemma when she says, “Either we’re
makers or just made” (54). In a world where the creative impulse has been
removed by the onus and imperative to consume—and then taken to its logical
extremes—the urge to create a league of one’s own and bring class action
lawsuits against the Auto American machine is understandable.



In this world, organized baseball “so roundly resisted Aunt Nettie it
finally had to be discontinued,” the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cardinals
disbanded, and Fenway, Wrigley, and Yankee Stadium all torn down (33). Talk
about a “say it isn’t so” moment! As *The Resisters *progresses, there is
hope that the Underground Baseball League and the movement to bring
baseball back to the Olympics (yet again) will rescue the game. These
developments set up Act II of Jen’s baseball drama and introduce
nationalism as a theme when the Netted officials of the United States of
Auto America want Gwen to “cross-over” from her Surplus status to play for
the national team to improve their chances of beating ChinRussia. With some
effort, Gwen is convinced to attend NetU, where Coach Link is working to
bring baseball back to the Netted world.



At the KWLS in January, Jen read from her book and described her process
and inspirations. In particular, she talked about the joys, restraints, and
drawbacks of writing genre fiction. What I have dubbed as the mass market
baseball fiction formula (MMBBFF) was perfected in the second decade of the
twentieth century in the pages of *The Saturday Evening Post *(SEP) and
other mass market general interest magazines. In a large portion of those
stories, a young man leaves his rural hometown, puts aside his work on the
farm or some other manual labor to come to the city to make his way in the
world via the agency of baseball: getting a job in the minor leagues,
getting ahead by reaching the major leagues, and then winning the pennant
and a World Series share as a stake to get married and take his place in
society as the head of a household. More than a hundred years later, the
MMBBFF is still with us and Jen’s book illustrates this.



Gwen Cannon-Chastanets and her catcher Ondi are identified as “naturals”
early on. They find no competition on the Surplus Fields; worse yet, their
skills seem to diminish when they play there, arousing the suspicions of
Gwen’s mother Eleanor, who was a civil rights lawyer before Aunt Nettie
made her job obsolete and she was deemed “un-retrainable,” smells another
class action suit against the all-encompassing Internet. At the same time
Jen employs the MMBBFF, she proves she can break away from it when she
skips ahead to the third season of the Underground Baseball League and
introduces pie breaks for the players. Like Bernard Malamud in *The Natural*,
Jen includes and/or references numerous elements from baseball
history—invoking Jackie Mitchell, a female pitcher who struck out Babe Ruth
and Lou Gehrig at Chattanooga, TN, the home of the Lookouts, which is also
the same name as Gwen’s team.



Jen follows the MMBBFF when she has Gwen leave her Surplus world and take
Ondi with her to NetU for Act III of the book. Jen continues to offer the
elements of baseball history, invoking Ida Borders (who reached AA in the
minor leagues as a pitcher) as well as other female baseball players. When
Gwen is identified as a “female Satchel Paige,” it is both a reference to
her large arsenal of pitches and to her mixed Asian/African/Caucasian
ancestry that stands in sharp opposition to her “angel fair and male”
teammates (141, 98). The fact that Act IV contains a Big Game for Gwen to
prove herself should come as no surprise—as well as the fact that Jen gives
her own twists to the formula, which I will leave for readers to discover
on their own.



My review has focused on the baseball elements of *The Resisters* and has
only scratched the surface of the near-future terminology, surveillance
technology, social media advances, class structures, and cultural
evolutions of the world Jen created in this relatively short novel. The
book easily could be expanded by two or three hundred pages, and Jen could
return to this world in a sequel—which is what Stephen King is rooting for,
according to the blurb he provided. Drawing on the freight baseball has
carried since the nineteenth century, Jen uses her narrator to argue that
the game is “more than a sport,” just as *The Resisters *is much more than
a baseball novel (153). The presence of the former disenfranchised consumer
citizen Gwen Cannon-Chastanets on the field in the Netted world and at the
Olympics allows Jen and her narrator to argue further that “if baseball
took on a hallowed meaning, it took on that meaning in our American dreams.
For was this not the level playing field we envisioned? The field on which
people could show what they were made of?” (153). This vision may be hard
to see at this particular point in time as we live in a world mostly
without baseball, or any other live sport for that matter, but here’s
hoping we don’t lose sight of the game’s meanings any time soon.



Gish Jen. *The Resisters.* Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Hardbound, 301 pages,
$26.95.
Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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