BOOKS & AUTHORS : Novelist Decides to ‘Just Write the Story I Want to Write’

It’s the visitors’ half of the fifth inning of Game 3 of the 1932 World Series: the Chicago Cubs vs. the New York Yankees at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The score is tied. Babe Ruth steps to the plate. He points his Louisville Slugger toward a spot in the outfield. Crack ! A long fly ball. It’s going . . . going.

The stunned hometown fans sit silently in the stands as the Bambino’s fly ball sails over the center field bleachers and into baseball history.

But this ball, rising “like a bubble at the bottom of a ginger ale,” keeps on going--over the tenements and stockyards, over the city limits and the state line. It keeps on soaring. “Over the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and west to the very edge of the American continent. Two thousand miles on the dead fly.”

From their rooftop vantage point on the Parkview apartment building overlooking Wrigley Field, 14-year-old orphan Buddy Easter and his invisible friend (the spirit of Abner Doubleday, the reputed inventor of baseball) sit in awe as Ruth’s ball sails overhead. Spurred by a sense of fulfilling his own destiny, Buddy decides to pursue that shining object in the sky, “to shag it to the ends of the Earth and then snag it on the dead fly.” The ultimate baseball souvenir.

So begins Anaheim author Gordon McAlpine’s imaginative first novel, “Joy in Mudville” (Dutton; $17.95), a blend of history, myth and magic in which three disparate characters travel cross-country in pursuit of this soaring baseball--Buddy; dime-a-dance girl Alice de Minuette, a woman with a past who is fleeing mobster Al Capone, and scientist Loren Woodville, who is convinced Earth is being visited by tiny Martians who travel in speeding white spaceships.

Describing McAlpine as a “gifted stylist with clean, clear muscular prose,” Publishers Weekly calls the book a “gracefully written first novel.”

Despite its baseball opening, “Joy in Mudville” has nothing to do with America’s favorite pastime and everything to do with pursuing one’s dreams.

“That ball, sort of arching across the country, is the object they can attach all their personal dreams to and, perhaps in a larger sense, it’s a kind of a general American dream,” said McAlpine, 30. “That’s one of the reasons I chose so many archetypical American characters.”

Other novels, most notably E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” have blended fictional characters with historical figures but, McAlpine said, he wanted to take it one step further: “So in this book, my fictional characters not only run into historical characters but fictional characters from other stories.”

Take, for example, Prof. Marvel, legendary balloonist and soothsayer, who, after accidentally leaving Dorothy behind in Oz, has arrived back home. Movie mogul Monroe Stahr, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon,” also makes a cameo appearance. And when Alice stops in the mythical town of Smallville, McAlpine even brings in a broad-shouldered young man named Clark who leaps in front of Alice to ward off bullets from Capone’s gunmen.

“The challenge was to make my fictional characters work in the same context as historical characters and other fictional characters,” McAlpine said. “One thing all the characters have in common--both the historical ones and the fictional ones--is Clark Kent and Prof. Marvel and Al Capone and Babe Ruth are all of sufficient mythical quality. That was the test.”

After one publishing house turned down the novel in 1986, McAlpine said, one of the biggest changes he made in his second draft was to “elevate the protagonists of the story so they too could move in this company without being overshadowed.”

“The risk that a book like this runs is that the characters will be cardboard or comic book characters, and that’s the thing I wanted to avoid,” McAlpine said, adding that he took care to make his characters “people with pasts and concerns of their own.”

McAlpine started writing “Joy in Mudville” in 1982 while he was a student in UC Irvine’s graduate writing program. A portion of the novel served as his master’s thesis and he worked 5 years on the book.

“I was working full time at a number of different jobs, which slows things down considerably,” said McAlpine, whose resume includes a stint writing questions for a short-lived TV game show.

Although he teaches English at both Servite High School in Anaheim and Irvine Valley College, he still finds time to write: He and a partner are finishing a screenplay (“a romantic horror story”), and this summer he plans to get back to work on his second novel.

The inspiration for “Joy in Mudville” came to McAlpine while watching a Chicago Cubs game on TV one Saturday afternoon and seeing Dave Kingman of the Cubs hit a ball out of the park.

As baseball fans know, apartments overlook Chicago’s Wrigley Field and out-of-the-park home runs are not unusual. But to McAlpine, watching Kingman’s home run, “it seemed to me almost magical that a big league baseball could come soaring out of the sky and land in your front yard. It’s that real, semi-magical event that kind of kicked off the idea and, in a way, the whole premise is just enlarged from that.”

The Lynwood-born McAlpine, who has a bachelor’s degree in English, said he became serious about writing when he was 15--”serious to the point where I don’t think there has been a time between then and now that there wasn’t something sitting in my typewriter.” That doesn’t mean, he added, “that there weren’t periods when there was no typing going on.”

McAlpine started writing his first novel when he was 20, but abandoned it after a couple of years: “I wasn’t ready.”

With that unpublished first book, he said, “I felt obliged to write the great American coming-of-age novel and to do it with all the conventions, (including) the sexual initiation.”

In writing “Joy in Mudville,” McAlpine said, he managed to set aside those conventions--and his own self-imposed restraints--and instead just write the best story he could. “Much to my surprise, after finishing a first draft, I discovered it is a coming-of-age novel.”

While he was a student in the UCI writing program, McAlpine wrote two baseball short stories before he started “Joy in Mudville.”

“They had been a turning point for me. Both moved beyond everyday reality, as this book does.”

Until then, McAlpine said, he felt he needed to be a “realistic writer. And all of a sudden I didn’t need to do that. It occurred to me I better just write the story I want to write because I am not good enough to write a story I don’t want to write and make it work.

“That’s the thing I’m really grateful to that program for,” he added. “It’s one of those very simple truths you hear and think you’ve got it, but you may not. But when you do get it you really feel it, and the truth is I can write whatever I want and it turns out all right.”

In his case, McAlpine said, it is a novel of initiation that “can be looked at in a serious literary manner.”

Book Signing: Dr. Arnold R. Beisser, author of “Flying Without Wings: Personal Reflections on Being Disabled,” will appear at the UCI Bookstore in the Irvine Marketplace from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Beisser, who was born in Santa Ana in 1925, was a recent medical school graduate and national tennis champion at 25 when he was stricken with polio. In his inspirational book, Beisser, who is now a UCLA clinical professor of psychiatry, describes his search to make a new life and find meaning for himself.