THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL -- Philip Roth

Penguin Books -- tpb
New York -- ©1973 -- 328pp
ISBN: 0-14-007678-6

The Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history .. with drunken home-run sluggers, and a battle of midgets, this story takes a crazy spin on the sport of baseball.

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An American novel...definitely. Great? No so much so.

The writing of this is typical 1970's humor. Think M*A*S*H (yes, I know the book was published in '68, but the movie was released in '70, which helped popularize the book series) or the works of Kurt Vonnegut. It's a sort of intelligentsia humor. Sophisticated. Dry. Not a laugh-out-loud type of humor. And for me, this didn't work.

I have to be up-front. I'm not a huge baseball fan. I enjoy it a little bit more, now as I'm older and can look for some of the strategy, but I still find it a slow and mostly dull game. So...to have a book, full of dry humor around the sport of baseball, probably is not a good choice for me.

In large part, though, I had trouble visualizing anyone from this book. The characters were never real for, and without them being real, or characters that I could picture, I didn't really care anything for them. And for that I blame the author.

This is my second Philip Roth novel, and so far, I'm not particularly impressed.