Season's End: A Novel [Paperback]

Tom Grimes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 28, 1996

Mike Williams tempts fate when he appears on the cover of Sports Illustrated at age twenty-one. He becomes a major league batting champion and a national icon as he travels from innocence to disillusionment. Through the prism of baseball, Season’s End examines the rich, dark themes of young love, fathers and sons, rags-to-riches wealth, and the cult of celebrity in the media age.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An entertaining tale of minor league baseball, Zen philosophy, death, fame, and statistics. Mike Williams is a minor league player looking to make it big by attaining the ultimate measure of success: a remarkable batting average. George O'Kane is his Buddha: a fellow minor leaguer who plays like an all-star, yet is unconcerned with the scrambling for success or the constant incremental measures of his performance. He develops a method of hitting that inverts the standard injunctions of batting coaches: he takes his eye off the ball and knocks them out of the park. O'Kane teaches his philosophy of baseball to Williams before being called up to the big leagues. Tom Grimes's novel is the story of Williams's own rise into the majors and his ascent in understanding the real lessons of baseball.

From Publishers Weekly

This schizophrenic second novel from Grimes ( A Stone of the Heart ) veers from sluggish philosophizing and ponderous verbosity to snappy repartee and crisp narrative. Mike Williams, a left fielder and singles hitter for an unnamed major league baseball team, chronicles the intermittently compelling stories of his marriage to his high school sweetheart and battles with his agent, manager and team owner in the seasons between 1975 and the players' strike of 1981. Proposing baseball as an anchor of sanity in the craziness of the business world around it, Grimes contrasts the sharp realities of life with "the sweet illusions of the game." The first part of the novel, charting Williams's rise to stardom and its burdens, is smugly pretentious and nearly chokes the sly, sardonic humor that is its principal redeeming feature, although the rest of the book is better focused. Williams observes, "We are ballplayers. We accept the ineffable and get on with the game." Grimes should have have followed suit from early on.
Copyright 1992 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: 319 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (August 28, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803270674
• ISBN-13: 978-0803270671
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,067,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tom Grimes is the author of five novels. He edited The Workshop: Seven Decades from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Mentor: A Memoir recounts his friendship with Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir Stop-Time.

"From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes's brutally honest and wonderful 'Mentor. While there have been plenty of books on how to write, or how to get published, or how to promote your work, as well as a number of triumphalist accounts of "making it," this is a story of what it's like to just miss succeeding." --- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Visit: http://www.tomgrimes.org

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Season's End, January 20, 2011

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MBK - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Season's End: A Novel (Paperback)

I liked the novel but didn't feel it was of the same quality as "A Stone of the Heart" or "Mentor." Powerful insight into the harsh reality of major league baseball and the price of stardom. The characters are finely drawn. However, the many literary allusions that Grimes makes through his main character, Mike Williams, are hardly believable for a professional athlete. To retain them, Grimes might have done better had he written this book in third person limited point of view rather than in first person singular. Stunning and almost overwhelming imagery conveyed through powerful use of simile and metaphor.