Battle Creek: A Novel [Paperback]

Scott Lasser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 20, 2000

Gil Davison is the coach of an amateur baseball team in Michigan, national finalists many times over but champions never. He has spent his adult life juggling his roles as coach to the team, father to his estranged son who has made it clear he is doing just fine without Gil, and caretaker to his disapproving father who is dying of cancer. So when a hot rookie hitter wanders into town--fresh from a stint in prison--Gil convinces himself that this season his team must win the championship, their last chance to fulfill an elusive dream. But the events that unfold are unexpected, enlightening, and overwhelmingly powerful--and will change each of these men forever.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In his first novel, Scott Lasser takes on that time-honored topic, arms and the man--pitching arms, that is. But Battle Creek is no overblown baseball epic. Instead, the author focuses on a minor-league team--one whose propensity to lose in the final round of the nationals makes its sponsorship by a funeral home somehow appropriate. Can veteran coach Gil Davison turn things around? He's determined to do so, even if it means a touch of dugout downsizing:

He has made up his mind that this will be his last season. He wants to go out on top. In previous years he kept some people on board out of loyalty, or because he liked them, or because he liked their wives or girlfriends, or just to avoid having to fire them, but this year he won't do it. This year a player has to produce, or he's gone.

Gil, who's been diverting money from his father's checking account to keep the team in cleats, is the center of the novel. But Lasser introduces us to the rest of the roster, too. There's sexual athlete and power pitcher Ben Mercer, who succumbs to baseball's equivalent of the Dark Side and starts throwing spitballs. (Mercer, by the way, is a stockbroker when he's not on the mound, which may make for a certain harmonic convergence between him and his bond-trading creator.) There's also a young hitter, Luke James, whose promising career gets truncated by a well-placed bean ball. Throughout, Lasser has a fine, glancing touch with "the dance of infield practice and the pop of the ball in the catcher's mitt, the flicker of signals from the catcher with a man on second, and the lean of a ballplayer as he rounds third base." But aside from the generational head-butting between Gil and his father, the author's explorations of the wild and wooly world of American masculinity have something tentative to them. Aiming, perhaps, for the back fence, he has an unfortunate tendency to check his swing. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"Cigarettes and baseball. These are not unusual vices," thinks one of the middle American, late middle-aged characters in Lasser's powerful novel of thwarted lives. A bleak metaphor for middle-class dreams, the story imagines the defining effect one season of amateur baseball imposes upon the lives of a small group of players and their women. Now 60, Gil Davison gave up a promising baseball future three decades ago to placate his autocratic father, who considered his athletic achievements a waste of time. By way of vicarious engagement, and beginning with his own two sons, over the past 30 years Gil has become a coaching legend around the baseball fields of suburban Detroit. His star pitcher, 34-year-old stockbroker Ben Mercer, had two weeks in the big leagues with Baltimore. Nursing an arthritic elbow, the fastballing lady-killer has finally met a woman who is his match, and that's bad for his game. Vince Paklos, Gil's astute sidekick, had a meteoric month-long stint with a major league team. Chain-smoking his way through the final days of terminal emphysema, Vince needs money to keep his life insurance in force. Out on parole after serving five years for murder, at age 22 Luke James is a batting wonder who needs someone to find him a girl, pay his room and board and keep him out of jail. His team a perennial runner-up, idealistic Gil has always played by the rules in both life and ball, but he has never won the national championship held at Battle Creek. Luke's arrival comes at a critical time, and Gil's single-minded desire to earn the title becomes a matter of life or death when his 98-year-old father lies half-blind in a nursing home, sitting on money that's more than enough to make Gil's dream come true. First-time novelist Lasser's stark morality play is conveyed in undecorative prose. His language favors honesty over musicality but the narrative, with its poignant and disturbing insights into father-son relationships and its acceptance of the frailty of the human condition, is completely engrossing. Agent, Jennifer Walsh, Virginia Barber Agency. BOMC selection; film rights, Scott Rudin; author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1ST edition (June 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0688177638
• ISBN-13: 978-0688177638
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,429,474 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Scott Lasser is the author of four novels: Battle Creek, All I Could Get, The Year That Follows, and Say Nice Things About Detroit. His non-fiction has appeared in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Dealmaker Magazine. Lasser has worked for a number of now-bankrupt companies, including General Motors, Lehman Brothers, and Dealmaker Magazine. He splits his time between Colorado and Los Angeles, with regular trips to his hometown of Detroit.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best "guy" book this girl's ever read, July 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Battle Creek: A Novel (Paperback)

I became so immediately involved with the characters in this story that I forgot I was reading a book about baseball and men's lives ... I was completely engaged in everything about the story, and hated to see it end ... Thanks to Scott Lasser's amazing craft for characterization, I am now intrigued with baseball and the players and looking for an amateur baseball game, as well as Scott Lasser's next novel...

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lasser explores price of victory in touch 'em all novel, September 28, 2000

By 

Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Battle Creek: A Novel (Paperback)

Battle Creek joins Bang the Drum Slowly and The Natural in its exploration of the lure and costs of baseball on the American psyche. Focusing on the final season of generationally-sandwiched head coach Gil Davison, the novelist Scott Lasser is at his best when the themes of competition and success mingle with the tensions engendered in families which do not function well. His descriptions of his terminally ill father are, to me, the strongest aspect of the novel.

In addition, his evocative narrative of actual games reveal a man who knows and respects the beauty of baseball. Unfortunately, the women who populate his novel are distressingly unidimensional: either poetically detached or built like centerfolds (with little personality or intelligence to attract them to readers who would prefer "real" women to affected groupies).

Nevertheless, I commend the novel for its exploration into the darker sides of our character, our obsessions with winning and our delusions as to how much victory truly means.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding!, March 11, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Battle Creek: A Novel (Paperback)

Mr. Lasser writes a compelling tale about people. The premise is baseball, which admittedly is a subject that doesn't interest me, but in spite of that, I really enjoyed the book. A true work of literature, and not just another mindless page-turner, this high-quality work is haunting and yet strangely uplifting.