Yesterday I read A Great Day for A Ballgame by Fielding Dawson, a charming love story offering a very male perspective on a relationship’s stages of flirtation, desire, and seduction. Dawson, who died in 2002, was a writer who sought to convey the sequences and patterns of actual thinking and speaking, deliberately ignoring the traditional “rules” of fiction pertaining to dialogue, description, and plot development.  In this basically sweet (and yet still very sexy) novel of blooming love, Dawson lets his readers become the man who meets a woman and falls for her, complete with stuttered lines, quaking thoughts, and perfectly suave moments followed by utter muck-ups.

The narrator, who remains un-named and is clearly Dawson himself, is an experimental and temperamental writer, and the woman he falls for is Amelia West, literary editor of a woman’s magazine.  She hates her job but sticks with it because she loves reading and having time for her son; he tolerates his day job as service manager at a furniture store because he knows that, given his artistic and unique writing, he will never make big bucks writing.  Together they make a perfect whole, a complete picture of understood meanings, thrusting desire, and heartfelt domesticity.  Both have been there and done that but they are still fresh and wide-eyed in their love for each other.

There are awkward and sweet courtship moments, wonderful sex scenes, disturbing interactions between child and boyfriend, vicious (and insightful) diatribes against the publishing industry, and long, twisting, and very real conversations between the lovers: what ties all the pieces together is Dawson’s insistence that all individuals who are united by love or desire or shared interests/hopes/ideals can be interchanged, mixed and separated, but are and will remain joined over time and space.  As the narrator is joined forever with his beloved sister, he is joined now with his Amelia.  Baseball is another connector, the sport enthused over by all three of the main characters, man, woman and son, and the force that finally allows the man to claim a connection with the son.  Any day that is a great day for a ball game is also a great day for love, conversation, sex, and connection.