Title: Brittle Innings

Author: Michael Bishop

Date of First Publication: 1994

Place of Publication: Bantam

Type: Novel

Characters: The Creature

Themes: BYRONIC HERO; RACE/POLITICS; SYMPATHETIC MONSTER; POSTHUMAN

Critical Summary: Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings is in equal parts a baseball adventure, a Southern Gothic novel, a coming of age story and a historical period piece. The story is set in the rural American South in the year 1943, while America is engaged in fighting World War Two. The protagonist of the story is seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, a novice player for a minor league baseball team called The Highbridge Hellbenders. In his quest to make it into the Big Leagues, Boles meets and befriends the team’s monstrous power hitter, a giant man named Hank “Jumbo” Clerval. Danny soon comes to discover that his extremely large, hideous and literate buddy is in fact Victor Frankenstein’s famous creation.Brittle Innings is interesting because it is written as a direct sequel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; but aside from the presence of the creature, this novel seems very grounded in realism and it reads much closer to historical fiction than a fantasy story. Bishop’s choice to introduce the fantastical elements into a realistic setting is his way of connecting this story to Shelley’s work in Frankenstein because of the thematic similarities between her original and the story he wants to tell about America during the time of the war. The character of Frankenstein’s Creature is perfect for the kind of commentary that Bishops wanted to make about the nature of outcasts, friendship, and racial discrimination.

While Danny Boles may be the protagonist of the story;,Frankenstein’s Creature is just as central to the plot and Danny’s relationship with Hank “Jumbo” Clerval is perhaps the most important thing in the story. Through Danny’s friendship with The Creature, Bishop is trying to explore Shelley’s themes of the Sympathetic Monster and the Byronic Hero. The bond between Danny and the Creature is first formed because of their shared outcast status. The Creature is mocked because of his strange appearance and freakish strength and Danny is mocked for his verbal stutter. Frankenstein’s creature sees a reflection of his own problems in the character of Danny, and together they struggle to deal with the trauma of their respective pasts and to find purpose in a cruel and possibly meaningless world.

The themes of unfairness and being shunned by society carries over to another important theme in the book, the deep racism embedded in the history of the American South. The status of both Danny and Hank as outcasts is important because it gives Bishop narrators that are somewhat detached from the mainstream culture so that the author can examine the racism that dominated Baseball and the American South during The Forties. Danny and the Creature are some of the only enlightened characters in the book, and the rest of the cast very much reflects the racism of the South before the Civil Rights Movement. The theme of racism is ever present in the story but it is most prominent in the story of one of the side characters, an African American man named Darius. He is the most talented player on the team but open racism has severely reduced his prospects for advancement in the field of professional baseball. Danny and the Creature are able to sympathize with the mistreatment of Darius, as his experience with discrimination is not so different than their own. By adding this subplot, Bishop connects the themes of sympathetic monsters and Byronic outcasts with the more realistic theme of racism and discrimination in American culture.

Administrative Notes: True Fong-Vig, CSUF; Dr. David Sandner, CSUF (editing)