Near the end of Moby-Dick is an indelible description of two boats lost to the White Whale: “The odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Reality rears its ugly, barnacle-encrusted head, and the mind retreats to cheerful thoughts of the ladle, the pewter cups, and the fireside.

This tension lies at the heart of Chad Harbach’s Melville-obsessed debut novel, which is also a baseball novel, a campus novel, and a Jonathan Franzen-blurbed publishing event. Fielding’s epigraph is a snippet from fictitious Westish College’s fight song, the sort of thing belted out by punch-ruddied lads of the Old School. The book emanates from a wish peculiar to happy college students: “All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to
ever change.”

Fielding’s hero is Henry Skrimshander, an uncommonly gifted shortstop plucked from obscurity by Westish’s catcher, Mike Schwartz. Mike engineers 17-year-old Henry’s enrollment after observing his skills in a summer game. “Skrimshander”—that’s a maker of scrimshaw, or carved whalebone—is the reader’s first briny taste of Melville mania, but it’s representative of a weakness for pointless allusion. The team has a Starblind, which sounds like “Starbuck”—so? Someone exclaims, “Ah, the ambiguities!”—a reference to the subtitle of Melville’s Pierre. The reader feels smug about scoring an extra-credit point. When, inevitably, the phrase “white whale” surfaces, it’s to describe a house that Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish, considers buying, a “big white symbol of bourgeois propriety.”