FICTION
Blockade Billy, by Stephen King, $25.
Baseball has always been a small but persistent element in Stephen King’s fiction. Now he brings us “Blockade Billy,” a swift, colorful novella set against the backdrop of Major League Baseball.
The narrative, in a handsomely illustrated edition, takes the form of an oral reminiscence by George “Granny” Grantham, former third-base coach for the mythical New Jersey Titans.
Speaking from the retirement home he calls the “zombie hotel,” Granny recreates the opening weeks of the 1957 season, when a succession of accidents left the Titans without a starting catcher. Desperate, the team called up an untried rookie named William Blakely to play the position until a suitable replacement could be found.
Against all expectations, Blakely excelled, hitting in nearly every game and blocking the plate with a ferocity that earned him the nickname “Blockade Billy.”
At first, as Granny himself notes, the story sounds like the kind of juvenile sports novel made popular by John R. Tunis, author of “The Kid From Tomkinsville.”
This being a Stephen King story, it inevitably takes a more sinister turn. Billy had a secret in his past, one too large and too shocking to remain hidden. When it bubbled to the surface, the Titans’ season unraveled, and Billy’s name, together with the details of his brief, eventful career, were struck from the official history of professional baseball forever.
“Blockade Billy” works as well as it does for a couple of reasons. The first is the narrative voice that King has conjured up for Granny Grantham. Funny, sharply observant and casually profane, it is the voice of a quintessential baseball insider who happens to be a natural raconteur.
Equally important is the lovingly detailed evocation of the game as it was played in 1957, when, with few exceptions, players were neither celebrities nor millionaires but “working stiffs” who earned, on average, $15,000 a year.
King’s descriptions of these tough, hard-bitten men and the hardscrabble contests they engaged in add a dash of nostalgia and a touch of gritty reality to this dark, absorbing portrait of a vanished era.
NONFICTION
The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter by Linda Grant, $25
Linda Grant’s new book, “The Thoughtful Dresser,” dismisses the notion of fashion as frivolity, “as if appearances don’t matter when, most of the time, they are all we have to go on.”
To make her point, Grant takes readers through some of the modern era’s defining fashion moments, from the replacement of restrictive corsets by loose-fitting flapper dresses to the late-1940s arrival of Christian Dior’s unabashedly feminine “New Look.” In each case, the shifts in style paralleled or reflected the social moment, proving that fashion is hardly meaningless.
There is an emotional component to getting dressed, writes Grant, and she best illustrates this in sections that connect wartime and fashion. Though lipstick was hard to come by during World War II, many women still managed to paint their mouths with what was known as the “red badge of courage,” a simple gesture that gave them a sense of normality.
Grant also interviews a Holocaust survivor who says that, of all the indignities she suffered while imprisoned at Auschwitz, one of the worst was being forced to be naked, because to be without clothes was to feel like an animal.
Not all of the book is so serious. Grant sprinkles in anecdotes from her own life, including her quest for the perfect pair of va-va-voom high heels and her penchant for pricey handbags. These passages serve as a reminder that we can acknowledge fashion’s significance without draining it of its fun.
