Bartleby, the Sportscaster by Ted Pelton (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

What follows is the eighth in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press reviews have covered every title from Calamari Press (at Big Other) and from Publishing Genius Press (at Mud Luscious Press).

It is a dangerous game to mimic or mirror or reinvent a classic piece, so it is perhaps the most dangerous game for Ted Pelton to reimagine the classic of classics, Herman Melville’s much honored and beloved story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, though in the end, it is an investment well worth Pelton’s time and energy.

Bartleby, the Sportscaster is the original book published by Subito Press outside of their annual fiction and poetry competition, a novella in which the character Bartleby is recast as a minor league baseball analyst who would “prefer not” to exercise his talents on-air, and whose journey succinctly parallels that of its classic, including all of the original angst and narrator rumination:

Here then is the story of a very sad case, like I started to say before. One of the saddest, Bartleby. I guess you might say he was just the last new prospect who didn’t stick, like a thousand others before him. He certainly wasn’t like any of the others. But he was more than just strange.

From Bartleby’s seemingly non-existent history and personal life to his unnatural genius and yet penchant for preferring not to, Pelton catches all of the elements of Melville’s story. But Pelton also smoothly and with much gusto modernizes the story, surrounding it in baseball statistics and descriptions of clinical depression, sculpting Bartleby into a character that contemporary audiences can immediately empathize / sympathize with:

There was nothing in his eyes when I looked at him. You could’ve shone a light at him and it would keep on going out the other side of the tunnels of his eyes. But what can you do with someone like that? The mind is strange. I think when you see a look like this and you know what it is, experience comes in and tells you what you already know, that you won’t be able to do anything for this guy.

All of this wonderful work makes Bartleby, the Sportscaster a successful novella, but there is also a moment where Pelton takes the story to a new level, where the novella turns into more than a new interpretation of a canonical tale. Near mid-line of the novella and for one chapter only, Pelton emerges from the text as himself, writing about the impending finalization of his very real-life divorce, meta-fictionalizing the entirety:

Begging my reader’s indulgence for a moment, I am now going to do what a fiction writer is not supposed to do. Forgive me, but I am breaking out of voice, if only for this section [ …] Now I am going to see if I can just write real life for a short time. As I write this, I, the real Ted Pelton, am about to have my divorce from my wife of 13 years finalized.

This divergence from the heart of the story becomes a new heart of the story, when we realize that Pelton is unpacking Melville’s Bartleby in search for answers to a deeply emotional and challenging time in his own life, when even an imagined character like Bartleby can be a lifeboat of understanding as well as a beacon towards or away from what we ourselves might become.

He looked for all the world like the very portrait of a dejected, forgotten, terrifically lonely man from some far off hovel at the end of the earth or time. He hadn’t a soul in the world and his loneliness gnawed at him like disease, chewing into undershirt, his skivvies, and probably rotting him out from inside his chest.

Bartleby the Sportscaster is available from Subito Press.

Subito Press is a nonprofit literary publisher based in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We look for innovative fiction and poetry that at once reflects and informs the contemporary human condition, and we promote new literary voices as well as work from previously published writers. Subito Press encourages and supports work that challenges already-accepted literary modes and devices.

J. A. Tyler’s latest novel Water is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in the coming months. His recent work has appeared with Cream City Review, New York Tyrant, Black Warrior Review, and Redivider, and he currently reviews for The Nervous Breakdown and The Rumpus. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.