The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

There was no joy in Mudville. Of course, they had that year where their baseball team showed promise, but then in the final game of that season, the one that could have made them town heroes, Casey struck out in the bottom of the ninth. Moundville, though, was worse.

"At least those guys got to watch a baseball game," says Roy McGuire, twelve-year-old Moundville resident and would-be catcher. After twenty-two years of perpetual rain, though, every baseball diamond in this Midwestern town has been washed out. Beyond that, there are the normal problems of economic hardship, family-abandoning parents (a set including Roy's alcoholic mother), and worst of all, the nightly trauma of enduring Roy's dad's cooking, which features dishes like Spam manicotti and fish stick casserole.

Such is the world Kurtis Scaletta has created for his debut novel, Mudville (which, just to get rid of any confusion, is about Moundville). Following in the vein of Mark Harris and John Tunis, the book fits the mold of the classic baseball novel - and does the archetype justice - full of lingo and dugout drama, and some off-the-field gravitas, to boot. When the rain finally stops, Roy and his pals immediately set about forming a squad, so they can resume a two-decades-old grudge match against rival town Sinister Bend.

Secrets of the City had the chance to sit down with Scaletta (who happens to be a prolific MNSpeaker), and chat with him a bit about the book. This Saturday, Feb 28th, he'll be at the Red Balloon Bookshop at 2 pm. 891 Grand Avenue St. Paul, MN 55105 651-224-8320

SOTC: The epigraph - "A father makes all the difference" - is from Roy Hobbs in The Natural. Is it fair to assume that Roy is named after Roy Hobbs?

Scaletta: It was a little bit of an allusion to that. It's also my middle name. Both Roy and McGuire are family names, actually. Roy was my great-grandfather, and I was named after him. My mom always told me I had to keep it in the family. If I ever have a son, though, I don't think he will be named Roy. I don't really like the name. My wife doesn't like the name. So I thought I would name a character Roy.

But I do like the fact that it's Roy Hobbs' name.

SOTC: Well that kind of kills the lead-in to my next question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. In Mudville, you mention Bernard Malamud's classic baseball novel, The Natural, a couple times. Roy greatly prefers the ending of the movie to that of the book. Which ending do you like better for The Natural?

Scaletta: [Speaking directly into the tape recorder] For the people reading this interview: In the movie Roy Hobbs homers and knocks out the lights in the stadium's scoreboard. In the book he strikes out. Sorry to spoil it for you but that explains the whole conversation.

I think the movie's pretty great. I like the book, too. And they're almost the same, except for the endings. And in the movie, the ending's so huge, that it really makes it. In the movie, you need that ending, and in the book, you need that ending.

SOTC: If you take the baseball books by Malamud and Tunis and Harris, what you end up with is a lot of stories about the game, but also a lot of stories about illness, and loss, and depression. Do you think baseball fosters a sad sort of literature?

Scaletta: I think it's that baseball makes people feel nostalgic. It's got this kind of resonance with American history. But I don't think it was ever an innocent game. There was always cheating, there was always the drunks beating each other up in the stands. We may like to think that there was this simpler time in American history, and if there's a wistfulness about it lately, I think it's just that we associate it with the past, and a time when we like to imagine that America was better.

SOTC: Do baseball and baseball literature go hand-in-hand?

Scaletta: Absolutely. I'm a bigger baseball fan because of the books. I was a reader before I was a baseball fan, I think. It became my favorite sport because of the sort of metaphorical language of baseball. There's all this great slang. This is a 'can of corn,' and these are 'the tools of ignorance.' And that slang resonates throughout American literature.

SOTC: Did you know Mudville would be a children's book from the start?

Scaletta: Yeah. I always liked reading as a kid, and I've always enjoyed children's books. Before I wrote this, I'd decided that it was what I was going to do.

SOTC: Do you think twenty years down the road, when people are writing baseball books for young adults, they'll include the whole steroid mess?

Scaletta: I'm sure there are sports authors that already write about steroid use.

SOTC: Meanwhile, Moundville has its own problems. There's the alcoholic mother, and the jailbird father, the slumping economy, Katrina-

Scaletta: Not Katrina - it was Grand Forks, actually. I lived in Grand Forks for eleven years. And so when I talk about the town being destroyed by a flood, it came from my memories of what happened in Grand Forks. We saw all that footage. Katrina came along after I'd written the fourth draft of this book.

But yeah, you know - I basically thought of it as a humor book the whole time. But I have a guy, the pitcher Sturgis Nye, who's been in a terrible car accident and who's disfigured. And I have alcoholic parents. And a guy in jail. I don't know. I wasn't trying to be downbeat. It just came out that way.

So much of it, though, was around this pitcher, Sturgis, who's incredibly talented but kind of troubled. I thought to make the kid troubled I had to give him a pretty dark past.

SOTC: I like that even after it stops raining, it rains about five more times.

Scaletta: It occurred to me that I had to have it rain again, because it does rain in life. Without it, everything would die. So I was just thinking about it being realistic. But I do like that first time it rains again, when everyone's worried because they don't know if it'll stop.

I have a lot of rain in my writing, anyway. After writing this one, I realized in the other stories I've published, there's always rain in them. I don't know - it must be some sort of personal metaphor or something.

SOTC: Well it seems kind of natural then that you got the idea for the book during a rain delay...  

Scaletta: Yeah. I'd been wanting to write a baseball book. I went through this big phase in the early 2000s where I was reading baseball books all the time and I wanted to write one. Once I went to the library and checked out like twelve baseball books. And so I wanted to write a baseball story, but I didn't know what it would be about. But the whole idea of a town where it's been raining for twenty-two years really is what helped me plan it. I was watching a baseball game, waiting for the rain to stop. And I thought, 'I wonder how long they'll wait?' I wondered what the longest anybody ever waited was, and what if it didn't stop so they could never make it up?

"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything," says Homer Simpson. "14% of people know that."

What Homer's getting at is my long-held belief that facts are overrated. They hinder the imagination, lead to games of trivial one-ups-manship, and they smell bad. I came to this conclusion over a series of internships - Soft Skull Press in Brooklyn, The Rake and The Onion here - all of which consisted of a good amount of fact-checking. Fact-checking sucks. And I'm not good at it. Maybe I don't care enough about details. Maybe because when I make phone calls to verify something I tense up and can't remember what information I'm trying to find out. And then all of a sudden my t-shirt is wet in the underarms. I'm telling you: facts smell bad.

For those who don't know about the practice and for some reason want to, John McPhee's "Checkpoints" in the current New Yorker provides a pretty decent history of fact-checking, what it entails, and why it blows so hard. Quoting from one of the magazine's former checkers:

"Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checkers imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick."

Reading that sentence gave me flashbacks to the "So Little Time" section of The Rake, for which one had to verify not just the dates and times of shows, but correct spellings of all the bandmembers' names, the band names, venues, and so on. Also we had to make sure the punctuation was correct - commas inside or outside quotes; words capitalized or lower-case after a colon. I imagine that checking a 150-word blurb about how Weezer was coming to town took about as much time as their actual set on stage. More than a couple times I somehow switched correct information to wrong information, I'm not sure how or why. To my former editors: I'm sorry.

Maybe it's something every writer should do, though, the way that all servers and bartenders agree that everyone should spend three months waiting tables, to know what it's like. Just sayin'.

McPhee's article is interesting not just for it's throwaway jokes - "A-Rod makes an occasional error, and so does The New Yorker"; "When I first worked at Time - in the year 957, during the reign of Eadwig the All-Fair..." - but because it's a glimpse behind-the-scenes, and in this age of reality TV and paparazzi and etc. etc. we all like a little voyeurism.

Magazines, we learn, often have fantastically anal-retentive fact-checking departments, whose members eat crap from authors and poop out legitimate information. Book publishers, on the other hand, usually leave it up to the author. "If material that has appeared in a fact-checked magazine reappears in a book, the author is not the only beneficiary of the checker's work. The book publisher has won a free ticket to factual respectability."  

So let's spend a minute with James Frey. Ready: go! Okay. So now we see why so many memoirs have turned out to be fictional. Which led perhaps to Chris Offut's fantastic definition of Creative Nonfiction: "Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir."

Which leads to Chris Offut's fantastic definition of Memoir: "From the Latin memoria, meaning "memory," a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer's parents for his current psychological challenges."

(Thanks, Jodi, of MNReads, for the link)

My last mini-anecdote: I work with a guy, Mike, who hates literature. Mike wants to be an English teacher. I'm still trying to figure this out. When the restaurant is slow, we have quiet arguments about whether or not fiction is valid. He refers to novels as 'just some shit that some guy made up.' Technically - if someone were to fact-check that statement - it might not be wrong. But I believe in something like the power of possibility. So I leave all y'all with two quotes:

From Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time:

"Each history in the sum over histories will describe not only the space-time, but everything in it as well, including any complicated organisms like human beings who can observe the history of the universe...If all histories are possible, then so long as we exist in one of the histories, we may [be able to] explain why the universe is found to be the way it is. Exactly what meaning can be attached to other histories, in which we do not exist, is not clear."

From Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities:

"So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach n o more importance to what is than to what is not."

Bladao.