Preview of The Universal Baseball Association Summary:

At its most obvious level The Universal Baseball Association is concerned with the inability of the "real" world to live up to the aesthetic and heroic expectations of an imaginative person. Finding no excitement or radiance in the accounting firm for which he works, on the streets he walks, or in the bars he frequents, the hero retreats into a fantasy world his own imagination has created around a board baseball game he has invented. By the end of the novel, the hero has been fired from his job as an accountant for insubordination, inattentiveness, and absenteeism; he has insulted his only friend and can no longer hang out in his favorite bar. In short, he is completely isolated from his world. The intensity of his game has overwhelmed him. If readers sympathize with Henry as a man who says all he wants from...