By Author . By Pairing . By Subgenre . Historical Non-Romance . Literary Fiction . M/M . Orlando Ortega-Medina

The Death of Baseball by Orlando Ortega-Medina

On May 24, 2019 by

The Death of Baseball by Orlando Ortega-Medina

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Blurb

Former Little League champion Kimitake “Clyde” Koba finds strength in the belief that he is the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe as he struggles to escape the ghost of his brother and his alcoholic father.

Born on Yom Kippur, teen prodigy Raphael Dweck has been told his whole life that he has a special purpose in God’s plan. The only problem is, he can’t shake off his doubts, his urges, or the trail of trouble and ruin that follow in his wake.

A decade later, Raphael and ‘Marilyn’ find each other wandering the plastic-bright streets of Hollywood and set out to make a documentary about the transmigration of souls. But when the roleplaying goes too far, they find themselves past the point of no return in their quest to prove who and what they are to their families, God, the world, and themselves.

Japan and Israel collide in the City of Angels in this explosive psychological novel about faith, idol worship, and the search for identity by the author of Jerusalem Ablaze, Stories of Love and Other Obsessions

Review

**Please note I use they/them pronouns for Clyde/Marilyn throughout this review because they seem to feel that they are more than one person in the same body – so more as a plural than as a gender neutral option.

I got a copy of this from NetGalley for my own reading pleasure, and I was honestly looking forward to reading it. I’m going to start with all of the things I loved about this book. The prose is beautifully wrought. It’s easy to immerse yourself into this world, and into the characters. I’ve never been a young Japanese-American boy, interested in Marilyn Monroe, or believed myself to be the reincarnation of anyone famous. I had no problem seeing and feeling everything Clyde/Marilyn saw and felt.

I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing and feeling everything Clyde/Marilyn saw and felt, but that’s an issue for further down in this review. Not all stories are sunshine and rainbows, and that’s okay.

I loved Clyde/Marilyn, and I wanted the best for them. I hated on their behalf. Ortega-Medina does a fantastic job of showing how Clyde/Marilyn grows from a child into an adult, and how they are failed by pretty much everyone in their life.

As a more neutral part of this review, this story is not uplifting in any way. I just want to get that out there. Don’t read this book if you’re looking for a happy ending, for anyone. No one gets one. Even with all of my issues with this book, I sobbed at the end, because I wanted better for Clyde/Marilyn and they never had a chance. Not one.

Also, what is it with literary fiction and incest?  Not all lit fic involves incest, but an awful lot of it seems to, and the lighter the skin tone of the person writing it the more likely that particular taboo is to be broken. (There is a less socially acceptable way of putting it, but I’m trying to cuss less.)  It’s like several generations of authors sat through Freshman English, read Faulkner, and said, “Okay, I can’t publish without this stuff, so… here we go!”

Rant over.

Ahem.

Both Clyde/Marilyn and Raphael start out in bad situations with frankly terrible families. Their families fail them at every turn, to be honest, and arguably Raphael never really had a chance any more than Clyde/Marilyn did. Raphael did a bad thing, but he did his best to make up for it. His parents, led by their rabbi, decide to not only kick him out of the country but exile him to a perpetual semi-war zone and force him to live with a part of the family that actively uses him as a scapegoat.

Awesome.

Now, this is an ongoing theme in the book. Family members failing the protagonists, abuse, scapegoating people for things that were never their fault. It’s awful, it’s overwhelming.

In Rafael’s case, it’s boring.

It’s boring, and it’s irritating. Rafael is self-righteous about it, and he’s an absolute turd of a man. He has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Neither does his family, don’t get me wrong, and I’m not sure where he was supposed to learn not to be a jackass. After all, his mother openly blames him for her illness and tells him she will not give him affection.

Real prize, right?

But he’s a jerk to everyone he meets. He pretends to be a nice guy to Clyde/Marilyn, convinces them he’s an ally and they’re safe, and then checks out when things get bad. He starts out bad, he ends bad, and he never gets better.

A large section of the book takes place in Israel, around the time of the Yom Kippur War. I can’t be objective about this. For one thing, Rafael’s family reminds me of a specific family of my acquaintance (who are objectively terrible people regardless of ethnicity or where they live.)  I also found myself bristling – a lot – at the absolute lack of mention of the people who were there before the colonists. It’s not like the book was set a hundred years after their forced removal. It wasn’t even thirty. There was a war going on, right then. Come on.

So there was this huge section of the book, focused on a character with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, surrounded by people who a) likewise had no redeeming qualities at all and b) reminded me of people I actually know and wish I didn’t. I made a good faith effort to try to read that section, in the hopes that Rafael had a point to his character other than reminding me that humanity is trash, but I finally gave up and skimmed it.

My biggest issue with the book, though, was the treatment of Clyde/Marilyn and their family. People who are trans, and people who are Japanese-American, are better placed to criticize this part than I am. That said, I did read it, I saw something, now I have to say something.

I’m not sure Clyde/Marilyn is trans. It’s not specifically stated. They do rob a bank seeking a sex change operation, but it’s not clear that they’re trans. They want the operation not because they’re dealing with gender dysphoria (was that a diagnosis in 1982?  I was 7, so I wouldn’t have been aware of it if it was.)  They want the operation because they believe they’re the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. It’s a different thing altogether. And there are times when it seems vaguely fetishized.

And in the end of the book, that identity seems to be struck off altogether. Is Clyde/Marilyn no longer trans, if they ever were to begin with?  Have they subsumed that part of their identity for safety in their new future?  Does trans identity work that way? 

For most of the book, Clyde/Marilyn is more or less unable to defend themselves. There’s one incident that seems essentially instinctive – anyone could do it and it doesn’t stand out. In the end of the book, Clyde/Marilyn suddenly starts using their Japanese name and is an absolute badass. What they do isn’t described using martial arts terminology, but it’s a little too… unsubtle, I guess. The change is improbable, unless somehow Clyde/Marilyn has been hiding their certified Asian Person Martial Arts Prowess all along and it’s just never been mentioned on the page because we had to talk about their chiffon blouse 87 times.

This book had a lot of potential. I didn’t even mind that it was chock full o’ despair. (I mean I minded, but sad stories need to be told too.)  What bothered me was the absolute repellent nature of one of the two main characters and the subtle racism. I wasn’t sure what the purpose of the book was, I’m still not, and I feel like Clyde/Marilyn deserved better.