The Crowd Sounds Happy, by Nicholas Dawidoff is a fascinating, well-written book that ultimately fails to satisfy. Subtitled, A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball; Dawidoff recounts his coming of age in New Haven with his mother and sister during the 1970s. Dawidoff's youth is vastly complicated by the fact that his father, who lives in New York, suffers from serious mental illness. His father, a graduate of Harvard and the Yale Law School had a promising career as a lawyer before his inner demons took over. The author struggles to fit in with his classmates, as his mother struggles to provide for her two children on a teacher's salary. Everyone struggles to deal with the father.
Only on the baseball field does Dawidoff feel at peace with himself, and the Boston Red Sox become something of a surrogate family. He is almost perversely drawn to the Red Sox, and their failures to achieve victory mirror Dawidoff's own fears and failures in life. The penultimate chapter ends his narrative with his acceptance to Harvard.
The first three-quarters of the book is wonderfully written, with a breadth of imagery and a depth of language. It is prose poetry. By the end, however, I felt as if Dawidoff's considerable vocabulary was simply being trotted out to show it off. So too, did I begin to feel let down by the narrative at around the three-quarter mark of this 267 page tome. While Dawidoff struggled to reach manhood under extreme conditions, I could relate, as I believe numerous readers could, to many of his stories of teenage anguish, confusion, and isolation. I began to sense, however, that he was never going to discover the simple secret to it all.
I found that I kept looking at the author's photo on the inside jacket and trying to decide from his face, if he ever realized that he could release all his own doubts and demons, if he would simply laugh them all to scorn. The photo shows a man with his mouth clamped shut and looking somewhat leery of the photographer. Right up to and including the last chapter which details his reaction to the Red Sox finally winning the World Series in 2004, I never laughed along with him. I sympathized with him, shared his anguish, enjoyed his prose, but in the end, I felt as if I had something to tell him rather than the other way around.
Mark Twain, who suffered his fair share of tragedy, once wrote, "Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them--and by laughing at them destroy them? . . . Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand."
We can take one of two paths in our response to Life's absurdity: We can cry, a la Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis or we can laugh at it a la Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Most of us start off crying, but with time and perspective, we learn to laugh at the absurdity of it all, including that absurd creation that we call the "self." Dawidoff never does.
Perhaps, had I Dawidoff's experience, I would not be able to laugh either. I certainly don't blame the man. Nevertheless, were I in his shoes, I would want someone to show me how to laugh. In the end, The Crowd Sounds Happy is a long trail of tears, devoid of ultimate meaning, because it is devoid of laughter.
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