The Man with Two Arms
Billy Lombardo
Overlook Press ($24.95)
It’s hard not to like Billy Lombardo’s The Man With Two Arms for its title alone. It is mythic yet so absurdly common that it is, um, disarming. The story about a father, Henry Granville and his son Danny, an ambidextrious switch-pitcher phenomenon with perfect symmetry who can pitch lights out with either arm, doesn’t disappoint the title. Henry Granville takes his passion for baseball and his interest in biology and applies it to his son, who prefers chewing on the leather of a baseball glove than any pacifier. Henry’s secret experiment is to see what sort of balance his son would have if he did everything, from brushing his teeth to picking up his utensils, without bias and with the same clinical approach. For the first third of the book, the tension is drawn out between Henry and his wife Lori, whose post-partum depression secludes her from Henry’s wondrous discoveries. Like Frankenstein, the possibility of an ambidextrous major leaguer lures Henry into forgetting about the reality of what this could mean. It isn’t until Danny begins to grow, the prodigy manifest, and he begins to make his own decisions in the fire of competition with his little league traveling team, that Henry urges Danny to keep his gift a secret. Henry discovers that he's left with no biological precedent in the animal kingdom to show him how to protect his son from what the world will do to him when it realizes how special Danny has become.
It is Lombardo’s capacity for empathy that has led to what some may seem as sudden success: his collection of stories, The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories (2005) was named a best book by the Chicago Tribune, and precipitated the onslaught of three books published in the past year, including his beautifully poignant novel-in-stories, How to Hold a Woman (OV Books, 2009) about a family dealing with the loss of its oldest child.
TMWTA is at heart a coming of age story for the relationship of a father and son: the son will strike out on his own, the father will regret his own shortcomings. Danny falls in love with the artist renting the upstairs flat in his parents’ Forest Park two-flat, he aces high school, lures scouts to his games as a freshman and during a fateful bus ride with his father, realizes that his supernatural talent is much bigger than baseball. By 19 years old, Danny Granville is catapulted through the minor leagues into Wrigley Field, where up until All-Star break, he is unstoppable. You know something bad is gonna happen—things like this always do—and it is only in the ending that Danny exceeds his story and becomes something unreal, a product more of the writer’s ambition than Henry’s. It’s a slight criticism, because I wanted to keep rooting for Danny throughout his rookie season (he’s playing for the Cubs, and damn me because I’m a fool fan) and it felt like Lombardo too didn’t want it to end but had to end it somewhere. It’s his successes, like Danny’s, that stick, however. To get someone to dream of the ballpark, to long for the leather of a glove, to enjoy the simple wonder of watching two little hands clasp a ball and throw it back, to be optimistic 100 years all over again, is a masterful accomplishment. The title says it all.
Stay posted for a Friday Feature interview with Lombardo.
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