The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

National Review, Oct 24, 1986 by Mike Shannon

NO ONE WILL ever accuse W. P. Kinsella of yanking his starting pitchers too soon. In The Iowa Baseball Confederacy Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown of the Chicago Cubs and "Arsenic" O'Reilly of the minor-league Iowa Baseball Confederacy All-Stars go the distance in a 2,614-inning pitching duel in Big Inning, Iowa, that lasts from July 4 to August 12, 1908.

This fantasy baseball novel, a worthy successor to Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, combines favorite Kinsellan elements (an Iowa setting, a father-son baseball bond, Indian mythology, gentle parody of organized religion, reincarnation, magic) to make a world and a story so fantastic that only an artist as gifted as Kinsella could hold it all together. Gideon Clarke, the protagonist, is a spurned baseball seer who has inherited from his eccentric father knowledge about the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, the exhibition game the Confederacy played against the 1908 Cubs, and a flood, like the one in the Bible, that totally washed away both the town of Big Inning and all memory of it and of the IBC. His monomania about proving the historicity of his knowledge leads Gideon to make a magical passage through a "crack in time" back to July 4, 1908, when his hometown of Onamata is once again Big Inning and the IBC All-Stars are preparing to play the Cubs. As the game progresses, Gideon discovers that there is more to the contest than the pride of the ball teams. A centuries-old Indian warrior named Drifting Away, whose wife was murdered by white men, had a "power vision" about baseball because "baseball is the one single thing the white man has done right." Drifting Away manipulates the game in favor of the Confederacy in an effort to do the penance that will reincarnate his wife. Gideon's falling in love with a beautiful woman named Sarah (who happens to be one of four partial reincarnations that are about to reunite to form Drifting Away's wife) brings him into deadly conflict with Drifting Away and thrusts the novel toward an ingenious and bittersweet conclusion. In witnessing the game Gideon realize his dream but learns that "accomplishing your heart's desire is not all as wonderful as you expected." The reader comes to appreciate Kinsella's theory about the goal of fiction, as expressed by a story-telling character in the novel: "It's the story that counts, Gid. Once it's been told it's as good as true."