"The Art of Fielding"

I have a copy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, one of the Great American Novels, given me as a school prize. (I didn't win many.) As a ten-year-old, it was above my head, and indeed it remains unread. But I have just learnt a bit about Melville himself from Chad Harbach's debut novel The Art of Fielding, which I finished yesterday.

Harbach's book looked intimidating - for being ostensibly about baseball, another no-go area for me, though I doubt it's any more arcane than cricket (which I love). I don't often think either about tackling books more than 500 pages long, but I needn't have worried: the story swings along nicely, with some neat twists. Whenever it threatens to get too frightening, the plot veers towards grand guignol.

I particularly liked the author's inventiveness with adjectives ("clean, chromatic, shapely, sun-kissed" for "girl/women": "bread-based" for religions) and names: Opentoe College; Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist; Angela Fan; President Valerie Molina; Chef Spirodocus.

And then there are the philosophical riffs: “... the Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”

Franzen evinces a genuine concern for the environment: Harbach, it seems to me, doesn't, even though one of the characters has a lyric comprimario role as the Green voice. Addressing the question of whether his lover should or shouldn't make a major property investment, he says: "Thoreau's Journals...When a philosopher wants high ceilings, he goes outside. He doesn't buy an oversize house that requires massive amounts of dwindling resources to heat in the winter. And to cool in the Summer. Let's not even talk about air-conditioning... Do you think you get a free pass because the house is old and lovely? ... Waste is waste, sprawl is sprawl. Your good taste doesn't count. If there's any kind of exclusionary, private-club-style afterlife, St Peter won't be asking questions at the gate. You'll just be lugging all the coal and oil you've burnt in your life, that's been burnt on your behalf, and if it fits through the gate, you're in. And the gate's not big. It's like eye-of-a-needle sized. That's what constitutes ethics these days - not who screwed or got screwed by whom."

Rain stopped play

Last night, in time for dinner, I met up here in Brasov with the rest of a party that my friend Mark had asked me to join. They had all flown to Bucharest - yesterday - where they had a tour round before what was evidently a long and tiring minibus journey: I felt lucky to have missed all that - transit rather than travel.

It's a novel experience for me, gaining admission to a group with an established chemistry, yet apparently willing to welcome an outsider into the magic circle. Judging from the conversations we are having, I am going to need to be on my mettle. Topics include 21st Century science, the multiverse, leaps of faith, technological fixes, and (of course) gay marriage. There is more than a hint of climate scepticism about, which could be tricky. However, the Alsatian moonshine I had brought with me went down well at the late evening session: most of us stayed up to sit outside the hotel in the great square on which Casa Wagner sits - the moon shining down on us.

We were sweltering rather when listening to the history of Brasov's bastion this morning on our tour of the bounds; but since lunch it has been pouring cats and dogs, and we had to scamper to avoid a thorough wetting as we crossed to our hotel. Until 1790, Romanians weren't allowed into the exclusively Saxon town of Brasov: hence, there is no Orthodox church within the old centre. We visited - briefly only (a service was beginning) - the Black Church, Europe's most Eastern Gothic building, before leaving the old city for the delightful first Romanian school (and a fine museum above it) a short distance outside the formidable Catherine's Gate: Vassily and Nic showed us round, the one ebullient as the other was taciturn.

Now we are sitting waiting, as parties do from time to time. My friend Richard is up to date on his postcards. Mark is deep into The Corrections, and... Oh, now we are off into the countryside!

"Freedom"

In a family of cat lovers, it's hard to express anti-feline feeling; so I much enjoyed being able to read aloud a passage from Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" to the family during our holiday (on which Thomas even brought along his cat). The riff comes towards the end of this marvellous book, where our hero, Walter is seen as "a nutcase and a menace" for wanting to protect the songbirds around the lake - where his family have been coming over generations - from the domestic pets brought in by the households in the new development, Canterbridge Estates. "The older cat owners on the street did politely accept the [coloured neoprene cat] bibs and promise to try them, so that Walter would leave them alone and they could throw the bibs away."

Franzen's gift is to be able to see the funny side of any serious argument. And so the book cavorts along through its nearly 600 pages treating all manner of particularly green issues in a highly entertaining way. I enjoyed it even more than his earlier masterpiece, "The Corrections".