SEASON'S END

Grimes's second novel—the spirited tale of a rookie player fighting to survive in the complex world of professional baseball- -picks up where his first, A Stone of the Heart (1990), left off in evoking the bleak choices facing the previous generation of middle- class America and its children's mad desire to get away. Mike Williams—the product of an urban, lower-middle-class family in conformist, TV-dazed, 50's America—burns with a desire to triumph over his dreary origins, and luckily he has the talent and drive to do so. His ability to hit a baseball gains the newly married 20-year-old entry into the minor leagues, where he blithely experiments with marijuana, Zen philosophy, and superstitious propitiation to ``the game'' (including, in one instance, having a child) in order to improve his batting average. Surprisingly, this combination works, and Williams finds himself propelled into the altogether different world of professional baseball—where after being named Rookie of the Year he is led by a manipulative team- owner, his own ambition and greed, and the soul-shaking tides of celebrity and wealth, ever deeper into disillusionment and mute despair. As Williams slams up against the consequences of his careerism—the dissolution of his marriage and a deepening sense of alienation and betrayal frighteningly like his father's—Grimes's own gift for lighting on the telling details of modern American life, evoking the pitfalls and pleasures of the pursuit of perfection, and laying out a standard American brand of the Faustian dilemma, combines with an obvious enthusiasm for baseball to make this an unusually engrossing coming-of-age tale, particularly appropriate for the post-boom 1990's. Passionate, entertaining, and refreshingly confident.