This short piece was commissioned for a regular FT Books and Arts series on classic book covers.
The Natural
By Bernard Malamud
Design by Lynn Buckley, 2003
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Natural, the first book by Brooklyn-born Bernard Malamud, is often cited as the best baseball novel ever written.
Published in 1952 (though more recently popularised by the 1984 film starring Robert Redford, which altered the novel’s unhappy ending), it tells the story of Roy Hobbs, an exceptionally talented but morally flawed player striving to become the sport’s greatest. His ambition ends in “bitter tears” as he agrees to take a bribe to throw the most important game of his career.
New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux commissioned regular collaborator Lynn Buckley to design the covers for paperback editions of Malamud’s back catalogue. Buckley, a painter who has produced striking covers for work by contemporary authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers, is known for designs based on cropped or enlarged stock pictures, augmented through the clever use of type.
For the Malamud series she created collage-like images, in which the titles seem to grow out of simple line drawings. None works better than her cover for The Natural, with its exquisitely understated balance of colour and form. Set against a pale grey background is an irregular octagonal baseball, in the same creamy tone as the author’s block-print surname. Its cerise seams are unstitching, the thread disentangling to form the novel’s title in cursive handwriting.
Visually arresting, the design also encapsulates one of the book’s central themes. Baseball, it seems to say, is unravelling. Even that most exalted American pastime, the embodiment of a pastoral spirit of self-improvement, has been tainted by corruption and greed.
The deformed ball may be suggestive of the one that the anti-hero whacks the leather cover off with one of his mighty slugs. Yet it also hints at how gifted men such as Roy (partly based on the legendary “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, who was infamously accused of helping to fix the 1919 World Series) squandered their abilities in pursuit of ignoble desires. In doing so, this cover reminds us, they turned an almost sacred national game into a crooked business.