Fjords Reviews

HOME | BOOK REVIEWS | Knuckleball by Tom Pitts
Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

 

 

Fjords Review, Knuckleball by Tom Pitts

August 13, 2015

Fiction
Knuckleball
by Tom Pitts

One Eye Press, 2015
128 pages
ISBN: 978-0692370773

 

by Hector Duarte Jr.

 

Tom Pitts’s latest noir novella, Knuckleball is about small town passion for baseball and a vicious murder that caps off the start of the season. The setting, however, is not a small town but the major metropolitan city of San Francisco. Pitts cleverly makes the city read like a small town by mapping it in a deft, tight-knit fashion that inevitably clashes the main characters together head on.

Knuckleball is a nostalgic story etched in a contemporary setting, which is a noir tenant: someone still trying to forge at least a little bit of good when such values have been long left behind. The tragedy lies in the fact the reader knows it will ultimately be for naught.

Enter Hugh Patterson: “old school, a throwback to another era. He was concerned with justice, helping old ladies across the street, and all that other stuff that seemed like a joke to the people of San Francisco.”

Patterson leads through example to a generation that stopped paying attention long ago. He knows every bodega owner and street dealer by name, understands the strange, sometimes stifling pecking order prominent in even the smallest Hispanic family; even speaks in embarrassingly broken Spanish in an attempt to connect a bit better with the regulars on his beat. Unlike the generation of cops after him, Patterson’s first priority is to protect and serve. He is proud of his city and just as proud of the Giants, begging his partner Vince Alvarez to join him at the end of their shift for “burritos, beer, and baseball. As near to nirvana as Hugh could ever get.” Patterson patrols opening day with a beaming smile and engaging sports talk with whomever will listen.

Vince Alvarez is tired of hearing it. Patterson’s new school partner can’t waste time with such small trivialities because as we learn later—for issues that are his own—he obsessively mistrusts his wife. Alvarez steps out of the taqueria to call her the afternoon of opening pitch and, Blam! Patterson is shot point blank in cold blood. Pitts balances a gruesome scene with a very moving image when Alvarez notices, “the little gold SF Giants logo that was pinned to the uniform, not permitted by regulation.” Thus the Giants season begins tainted in Patterson’s blood.

Mirroring Patterson’s love for baseball is teenaged Oscar Flores who, “hated his brother. He knew it may even be a sin, to hate your own brother the way he did, but the way he saw things, it could be no worse than the sins his brother committed.” Oscar came to love baseball after spending long hours locked in his room with it as a way to avoid his brother Ramon’s vicious ridicule and taunting. He is watching the opening game when he hears the gunshots just outside his bedroom window and spots the shooter. Convinced about the assailant’s identity, Oscar sets off a series of intersecting alibis and just enough red herrings to fill a baseball season.

Having left his partner suddenly alone, Vince Alvarez comes under suspicion from the force while grappling with the suspicions raised by his wife. He takes it upon himself to figure out whose story is the one that most accurately jigs. The irony being that he is not Hugh Patterson. Unfamiliar with his beat and its cast of characters, Vince starts realizing he should have paid more attention to his partner whilst he had the chance. Where Hugh might have started piecing this one together by the seventh inning stretch, Vince is out of his league.

It’s intriguing when an author uses setting as character and Knuckleball is just as much about the city of San Francisco, the life beating through it, and the life it beats inside these characters. Tom Pitts knows and loves San Francisco. The tight map he plots out is much like Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh: well drawn, easily navigated. He takes a big city and makes it read small and claustrophobic enough to have characters intersecting and missing one another by mere seconds. The baseball metaphor adds to this suspense by giving those involved a time clock by which to adhere to. It's not a rosy ending by any means. Is there resolution? Sure, but it comes at a disturbing price.

With Knuckleball, Pitts uncompromisingly delivers a quick, punchy story that—like a baseball to the ribs—leaves the reader gulping for air, wondering where the hit came from and when it will stop hurting.

Archives

Hush by Nikki Ummel

Alexis Rhone Fancher’s Erotic: New and Selected Poems

Chasing Homer by László Krasznahorkai

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

The Death of Sitting Bear by N. Scott Momaday

WHILE YOU WERE GONE BY SYBIL BAKER

MY STUNT DOUBLE BY TRAVIS DENTON

Made by Mary by Laura Catherine Brown

THE RAVENMASTER: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London

Children of the New World By Alexander Weinstein

Canons by Consensus by Joseph Csicsila

And Then by Donald Breckenridge

Dear Everyone by Matt Shears

Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones

Intimacy by Stanley Crawford

Lunch Poems by Deborah Kuan

The Best American Poetry 2016

One with the Tiger by Steven Church

Crosstalk by Connie Willis

The King of White Collar Boxing by David Lawrence

They Were Coming for Him by Berta Vias-Mahou

Verse for the Averse: a Review of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry

That Other Me by Maha Gargash

Simone by Eduardo Lalo

Swimming by Karl Luntt

Ghost/ Landscape by Kristina Marie Darling and John Gallaher

Enchantment Lake by Margi Preus

Bad Light by Carlos Castán

Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly

Staying Alive by Laura Sims

Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo

Fireflies by John Leland

Maze of Blood by Marly Youmans

Tender the Maker by Christina Hutchkins

Little Anodynes by Jon Pineda

Conjuror by Holly Sullivan McClure

Someone's Trying To Find You by Marc Augé

The Four Corners of Palermo by Giuseppe Di Piazza

Now You Have Many Legs to Stand On by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

The Darling by Lorraine M. López

How To Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes

Watershed Days: Adventures (A Little Thorny and Familiar) in the Home Range by Thorpe Moeckel

[INSERT] BOY by Danez Smith

Demigods on Speedway by Aurelie Sheehan

Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg

Singing Bones by Kate Schmitt

Wandering Time by Luis Alberto Urrea

Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail by Ralph Hamilton

Domenica Martinello: The Abject in the Interzones

Control Bird Alt Delete by Alexandria Peary

Twelve Clocks by Julie Sophia Paegle

Love You To a Pulp by C.S. DeWildt

Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin

Women by Chloe Caldwell

Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis

ESSAY 2:12 A.M. by Kat Meads

Revising The Storm by Geffrey Davis

American Neolithic by Terence Hawkins

Quality Snacks by Andy Mozina

Midnight in Siberia by David Greene

Strings Attached by Diane Decillis

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging by Joshua Dolezal

The New Testament by Jericho Brown

You Don't Know Me by James Nolan

Phoning Home: Essays by Jacob M. Appel

Words We Might One Day Say by Holly Karapetkova

Murder by Danielle Collobert

Sorrow by Catherine Gammon

The Americans by David Roderick

Put Your Hands In by Chris Hosea

I Think I Am in Friends-Love With You by Yumi Sakugawa

Third Wife by Jiri Klobouk

box of blue horses by Lisa Graley

Review of Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets

The Sleep of Reason by Morri Creech

The Hush before the Animals Attack by Carol Matos

Regina Derieva, In Memoriam by Frederick Smock

Review of The House Began to Pitch by Kelly Whiddon

Hill William by Scott McClanahan

Seamus Heaney Aloft

The Bounteous World by Frederick Smock

Review of The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Going Down by Chris Campanioni

Review of Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade by Rob Cook

Review of The Day Judge Spencer Learned the Power of Metaphor

Review of The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish

Review of Life Cycle Poems by Dena Rash Guzman

Review of Saint X by Kirk Nesset

Review of Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

Eve Asks by Christine Redman-Waldeyer