The Art of Fielding

This is a novel with the weight and IQ of a doorstop. A blurb from the execrable Jonathan Franzen should have been the tipoff. Nothing here is believable; no character emerges into three dimensions. To give the author credit, some of the dialogue begins to veer toward the credible along about page 250. But the Spider-Man comics of my youth in the mid-1970s were more complex and better written — by far.