The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball.
By Nicholas Dawidoff.
Pantheon Books, New York;
288 pages; $24.95.

There is a certain hedonistic pleasure I derive from watching a baseball game on television, from first pitch to final out. Many find the couch-potato approach to ballgame spectatorship augments what is seen as an inherent, lamentable slowness in the game, and prefer to experience the screen version in a public place, often with alcohol and other people, like a sports bar. Most privilege the live, in-the-flesh ballpark experience (where there is also beer to buy and drink, and other people to look at, talk to, and smell). But to me ballgame appreciation reaches a distinct, undeniable splendor in the reverie of TV—intimate camera angles on every play, pitch, and facial expression; and the accrual of minute detail after minute detail, forming a majestic, literary arc from inning one through nine.

It’s no coincidence I find bookish literary works are best experienced in similar fashion, and received in a semi-supine, couch-buttressed posture where the commune between Man and Art makes the solitary experience a shared one. Of all literary forms, the memoir is therefore most appropriate, in my mind, for a baseball book. And to thresh out the minutiae of a human life from the very beginning in narrative progression is a distinctly televisional baseballish practice. This is the mode Nicholas Dawidoff picks up for his The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball.

At 46, Dawidoff may not have yet played a full nine, but the book’s genesis is squarely in his relationship with his late father, the proprietor of a kind of sub-eponymous madness. Accompanying a Ulysses-to-Dedalus-style paternity that unconsciously infects the entire family, Donald Dawidoff’s mania and present-absence have mostly defined his son’s life to date. The book is also about Dawidoff’s mother, his family’s immigrant roots, growing up in America (the East Coast), death, being precociously smart, well-read, sensitive—more great stuff for a literary memoir. The author parses out these and other themes against his emerging realization that his father is indeed mad—which moves at the same baseballishly slow pace as his boyish burgeoning and, yes, literary love for the Boston Red Sox in the age of Fisk and Yastrzemski and Tiant.

Dawidoff’s father and baseball share a specter-like quality throughout, especially during the author’s early years. Each is unknowable in its distance. The dance between these two far-off possibilities creates a psychological pulse and narrative momentum.

By the time Dawidoff is three, his parents have split up, and his interactions with his father are increasingly traumatic, often marked by outbursts of anger or unsavory sexual discourse from the old man. Young Nicky and younger sister Sally grow up mostly in New Haven with their schoolteacher mom. “It is important for you to have a relationship with your father,” Dawidoff’s mother continually reminds him; but nobody tells him what form that relationship should take. Meanwhile, Nicky builds an assessment of his father based on the degrees to which he feels wronged by him. “Your father is supposed to protect you,” he writes, “and mine was scaring the hell out of me.”