You Gotta Have Faith (Faithful - Stephen King, Stewart O'Nan)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	Faithful - Stephen King, Stewart O'Nan
Date:	03/03/06 (159 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: If you're a mad King and sports fan, you'll love it

Disadvantages: If you don't like baseball, you'll hate it

One of the best short stories I’ve ever read was a non-fiction piece by Stephen King. Appearing buried in the back of his “Nightmares and Dreamscapes” collection, it was a piece he wrote following his son’s Little League baseball team one Summer, when they went further in the competition than for many years. It was a huge change of pace from King – a tale in which nothing really bad happened and it was written in an understated and slightly introspective way, which showed a lot more emotion than I was used to with King’s writing.

When I heard he would be doing something similar with the Boston Red Sox in 2004, I was immediately looking forward to it, expecting much of the same. The expectation as to how good this could be got higher and higher as the Red Sox defied the odds, supposed curses and history to have a remarkable season.

Supposedly, the Boston Red Sox are a cursed team, not having won baseball’s World Series since 1918. However, every year the same dedicated fans, the Faithful, turn up for Spring training and to every game at Fenway Park, hoping beyond hope that this will be their year. For many of them, the 2004 season would be no different than usual. For Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan, it was business as usual except that they would be writing down their thoughts, instead of just having them.

With these two men, we follow the highs and lows of the Red Sox 2004 season, from the pre-season thoughts to Spring training, all the way through until the end of the season. It’s an interesting format for a book, written in parts by both authors in a kind of diary format, but also featuring E-Mails between the two of them, chatting about the games, their thoughts and just general Red Sox stuff.

There is a distinct difference in style between the two men, which makes for an interesting read, as you get both parts of the story. Stephen King is much more of an armchair Red Sox fan. For sure, he goes to quite a few games, but he’s more the kind of fan that doesn’t feel he has to be on the spot to follow his team. His pieces are more introspective, more thoughtful and more about how it feels to be following the Red Sox, after you’ve had time to digest things. There are some parts that convey his emotions wonderfully, much like the “Head Down” story I was hoping the book would take after. Any armchair fan will know what King is going through as the season progresses.

Stewart O’Nan, on the other hand, is a complete Red Sox nutter. He gets to as many games as he can, standing in the crowd catching balls in batting practice and in games and running up to any player he can get close to for autographs and to chat. His parts of the book are full of raw emotion, where every victory is cause for a celebration and every defeat is taken personally. Anyone who has ever followed a team as closely as this will understand completely. The whole year is one huge roller coaster and O’Nan is the one in charge of the ride. He’s the one who really gives you the feeling of what it means to be one of the Faithful and makes you understand why people who have been waiting more than eighty years for their team to win the World Series can still believe.

For me, however, the really fun part of the book was the E-Mails between them. I don’t know how much editing has gone into them before they were published, but as a long term fan, it’s great to read something that Stephen King was not writing for publication. It feels as if, possibly for the first time, I am getting to see the real Stephen King. Although the sections of the book he writes are not all that similar to his normal work, it does feel considered, whereas his E-Mails don’t. He feels a lot looser and a lot funnier than I ever really expected him to be, and I couldn’t resist laughing when a man of his age (he turned 57 during the season) starts an E-Mail with “Duuuuuude!” Sporting fanaticism can make children out of all of us, and millionaire novelists are not immune to this by any stretch of the imagination.

How much you are going to enjoy this book will vary greatly depending on your interest in both the author and the subject matter. Personally speaking, I may be in the ideal demographic for this book, as I’m a huge Stephen King fan and, whilst I may not be a big baseball fan, I understand the game a little. This last means that when they talk about balls and strikes and Ks and RBIs, I know what they mean, even though while I know what ERA stands for, I’m not entirely sure what it means. For those who fall into the same category as I, I suspect you’ll thoroughly enjoy the book for much the same reasons I did, in that it gives you a new look at Stephen King – as a man, rather than as a horror novelist – and the subject matter won’t bore you.

For those who are made keen baseball fans and who could explain exactly what an ERA is, you may find this book is a little simplistic, although it is still well written and quite readable. If you have no interest in baseball or sports in general, for this isn’t a book just about baseball, but about being a mad keen fan, this may be a little heavy going, no matter how big a fan of either author you are. If you’re a fan of sports and enjoyed Nick Hornby’s “Fever Pitch”, you may identify with parts of the book, particularly King’s sections on how hard it is to root for a team that is constantly letting you down. If you’re neither a fan of sports or baseball, you’ll not really understand any of this and this is a book best left alone.

Just one word of warning for the baseball fan, though. This isn’t a book about baseball in general; it is heavily focussed on the Boston Red Sox. Many fans of other sides will be able to enjoy the feelings, but perhaps not identify as much with the emotions your average Red Sox fan seems to go through every season. Fans of the Yankees has best avoid this book, because as the Red Sox closest rivals, they do take a bit of a hammering. Baltimore Orioles fans will end up feeling a little hard done by as well, with their team being called “the loathsome El Birdos” more or less throughout.

For me, as a part-time Yankees and baseball fan and a full-time King and Liverpool FC fan and someone with a little baseball knowledge, this was a wonderful book. I loved seeing King as a human being, possibly for the first time. I loved hearing the stories and sharing in the emotion of fellow sports fans, especially myself being a fan of a team that has given me many highs and lows over the last twenty years. And I enjoyed hearing and reading a little about baseball, a game which I feel a strange affinity for, even though I don’t always know why.

If your interests work along the same lines as my own, I thoroughly recommend this book and paying £7.19 from Amazon or £6.99 from play.com will not worry you and will seem like great value for money, as it did for me, as this is not the kind of book you will read just the once, but go back and dip in and out of occasionally. If you’re a small time fan of sports or baseball or looking for something a little along the lines of “Fever Pitch”, particularly the 2005 US film version, you might fancy looking for a cheaper price, perhaps the £4.50 that copies have been seen going for from the Amazon Marketplace.

This is one of those rare things, a well written chronicle of a sporting season. It was not put together after the fact, with fading memories and a video tape of the games, trying to feel forgotten emotions and transfer them to the page and written by someone who thinks they can write because they are fans. This is a book that was written as it went, with all the emotions spilled straight from the heart onto the page and written by two men who are as professional in their writing as they are in their fanaticism for the Red Sox.

This may not be the book written on my favourite sport and it may not be the sports book I have most readily identified with. But it’s certainly one of the books I have most enjoyed, in any genre, and unless you’re a Yankees fan, quite possibly one of the best sports books you’re ever likely to read. It comes highly recommended by me, especially to people like me, but only with care given that it could cause distress to some and boredom to others.

Summary: Two Boston Red Sox Fans Chroncile the Historic 2004 Season