‘Tartabull’ a timely tale Multidimensional book not for the literal-minded

TARTABULL’S THROW, by Henry Garfield, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001, 262 pages, $16.

Every good major league baseball player learns how to stay loose, take the game as it comes. The same advice applies to readers of this book. It’s not a story for the tight-minded, the literal among you, those who seek logical reasons for every event in their lives, no matter how routine.

No, this is a book for those given to flights of fancy, who take life as it comes, not matter how illogical its twists and turns may be. Which is how our hero, Cyrus Nygerski, lives his several lives in this entertaining novel of baseball, werewolves, time travel and a bottomless hole in the center of a Maine tidal cove. The Hole, as it’s known to lobstermen and residents of the small coastal community on the shores of Rum Runners Cove, shows up on charts as being 200 feet deep, while the waters around it become mudflats at low tide.

That 200 feet turns out to be the limit of the surveyor’s instruments. In reality (if you can call it that), The Hole is bottomless, a black hole, scientifically speaking, where time is more relative than it is in the rest of Maine. If you could dive deep enough, as Aunt Polly explains to Nygerski, “You could travel back in time, you can change anything. You could even go back, if you could go back far enough, and kill your parents before you were born. And then how would you have been able to kill them, if you had never been born? It’s a famous paradox.”

One which readers (who, you’ll recall must always stay loose) will have to take on faith as they travel the several time lines woven through this tale of werewolves and baseball. The baseball, in a juxtaposition of true reality with outlandish fantasy, is mostly true, especially when it comes to the Boston Red Sox and their storied 1967 run for the championship. Henry Garfield knows his baseball, and especially the Red Sox. He could, if you asked, diagram every play, every inning, of the last 25 games in 1967, and quite likely most of the games played since. As a fan (not in Garfield’s league) who watched the ’67 series on a big-screen TV, I found the games lived again in this book’s lively and knowledgeable baseball prose.

But, you see, baseball is just a part of this multidimensional tale. There’s Cassandra, a werewolf who takes it seriously, her younger brother, Tim, who narrates most of the Maine coast scenes, and there’s the Maine coast itself, also as accurately and vividly described as the baseball games. You will, if you live anywhere near, or have ever visited that coast for any length of time, recognize the verity of Garfield’s descriptions.

You can tell he knows whereof he writes when he writes about Maine. But how much time traveling has he done? Cassandra, who tells Cyrus they had met before, “but not in this life” she explains, “in another time line,” and goes on to give Cyrus a four- or five-page lesson in quantum physics and the origin of the universe. But then concludes: “It’s very confusing.” Well, only if you are a strictly literal reader and allow such details to distract you from what otherwise is almost three different books between one cover. That’s because our heroes, heroines and villains travel three different time lines, each with their own narratives, tensions, defeats, victories, mayhem and adventures – some of them on the baseball diamond.

We do, for example, get to see Cyrus “Moondog” Nygerski, play at several different levels of excellence, including a stellar turn at the plate when he hits the game-winning home run of his dreams. And it’s dreams, you soon realize as a reader, that this unconventional book is really about. Dreams of boyhood, dreams of time travel, dreams of the Red Sox (after all, isn’t everyone a dreamer when it comes to the Red Sox?) and dreams of werewolves and other creatures of the darkness.

This is, after all, according to the publisher, a book for younger readers. “Ages 12 up,” the cover tells us. Although I’m way on the up side of 12, I had a good time reading it, especially when the focus was tight on baseball, and even more so when the Red Sox were winning, regardless of what time line they were on. One of these days Mr. Garfield may see fit to write a book that’s all about baseball. Now that would be a treat for all of us Red Sox fans. Meanwhile, a little time travel won’t hurt a bit.