The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. - by Robert Coover (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run.

Somewhere in a "major-league" American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh--no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh's life, as far as he is concerned, is lived in his head, where he is sole proprietor of the Universal Baseball Association, which is now entering its fifty-sixth season. The games are played with dice and scorecards, and the players are just numbers and names, but for Waugh they're more real than the dreary office, the dive bar, and the dingy apartment in which he spends his days. Still, being sole proprietor is a lonely business, and when a few rolls of the dice spell tragedy for the rookie pitcher Damon Rutherford--a player Waugh believes will reinvigorate the game--the whole association is imperiled, along with the sanity of its isolated creator.

Robert Coover's fiction was a map of America, and The Universal Baseball Association is smack-dab in the center of it. Baseball, in Waugh's world, is an escape, and Waugh is nothing if not an all-American escapist with a capacity for denial so profound that it can only be called optimism.

Review Quotes

"Coover's novel works for both the sports fan and the word fan. You don't have to know a thing about baseball to appreciate The Universal Baseball Association, but if you know everything about baseball, you will still appreciate the book." --New York

"One of the best baseball novels...Right from the start the book nearly matches On the Road for sheer electricity....There is something terrifying about the U.B.A., but as with all tragedy it is a terror that once seen, and lived through, yields a stronger sense of being alive." --Matt Weiland, The New York Times

"Robert Coover is one of the most original and exciting writers around. Every new book from him is great news." --Edwidge Danticat, McSweeney's
"One novelist to recognize baseball's fundamental unreality -- and to my mind the only one to mount a serious challenge to Lardner in creating a vivid and unique baseball-playing literary character while hurdling the philosophical tripwire -- is Robert Coover in his 1968 novel, Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop...In its dark, unreal loneliness Coover's baseball novel is, for 21st-century readers of fiction, the heights, or depths, of realism. He cuts deep into the cake." -- John Thorn, The New York Times
"Coover adds his dazzling two bits to the deconstructionist turf Paul Auster prowled in The New York Trilogy." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"[A] brilliant parody of noir and hardboiled fiction and film." --Michael Lipkin, New York Journal of Books

"Right from the start the book nearly matches On the Road for sheer electricity . . . Coover made baseball on the page seem three-dimensional, exulting in what he called the game's 'almost perfect balance between offense and defense.' He captured what Philip Roth, in a 1973 New York Times essay on baseball, called 'its longueurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its 'characters, ' its peculiarly hypnotic tedium'. . . The genius of the novel is in how Coover revels in the sun-bright vitality of the world Waugh has created, full of drink and lust and dirty limericks and doubles down the line - and yet brings Waugh face to face with its darkest truths." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Robert Coover (1932-2024) was born in Charles City, Iowa. He attended Indiana University and, after a four-year stint in the US Navy, the University of Chicago. For more than thirty years, he taught literature and creative writing at Brown University. He was the author of many novels and story collections--among others The Origin of the Brunists (forthcoming from NYRB Classics), Pricksongs and Descants, and The Public Burning.

Ben Marcus is the author of five books of fiction: Notes from the Fog, The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, Notable American Women, and The Age of Wire and String. He lives in New York City.