Review Book/Movie: The Natural

Bernard Malamud's book The Natural, published in 1952, is an eerie mix of fiction, shady realities, and fantasy that leaves the reader to his own conclusions.

The eerieness of the story of Roy Hobbs, potentially the greatest player baseball has ever seen, is that the reader never quite knows for certain where Roy Hobbs disappeared to for 15 years after being shot by a would-be admirer. And that's just the beginning of the saga of the great slugger who belts homers over the fence with his home made bat he has named "Wonder Boy".

Malamud's portrayed story situations are of the fantastical throughout, yet his story of Hobbs' struggle to return to the game of baseball after his bizarre absence are realistically problematic. The tale is of a teenage girlfriend, a relentless baseball writer intent on discovering Hobbs' past -- which actually doesn't really matter but tantalizingly mystifies -- a new girlfriend, a team manager who helps Hobbs find his life's mission, a baseball owner who helps Hobbs find self destruction and immediate regret, and an unknown, unborn son who helps Hobbs find his true longing at that last instant of self-examination.

But it's too late in Malamud's book -- Hobbs accepts a bribe from the team owner to secure his future and not to hit safely in the pennant-deciding game. Even though Hobbs changes his mind about the bribe and returns the money and vanquishes his bribing foes, he steps to the plate and is unable to deliver the winning hit and ends his story weeping "many bitter tears".

Malamud's use of fantasy-like metaphorical sequences to tell his story are entertaining, but they levitate the reader to an out-of-body experience that ultimately strangely allows less thoughtful focus on the realistic ending of human weakness and defeat.

In the less bitter and less fantastical movie of the same title directed by Barry Levinson, the screenplay of Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry writes Hobbs into the same ending of the rejected bribery situation, but allows the hero in Hobbs to emerge to win the deciding game and reclaim his life with his teenage love and his fifteen-year-old son.

Towne and Dusenberry also give Hobbs a broader presence within the story. They let the protagonist acquire higher understandings in life along the way, and an ability to reject the things of the past and to latch onto the important things of his future in a positive way, even after having to part with his new treacherous girlfriend and his broken "Wonder Boy", entities upon which his renewed baseball career had depended for everything.