Oh, Johnny, by Jim Lehrer
Random House, 2009
Rating: 4 (out of 10)
By James Bailey
If you strip it down far enough, there’s an interesting premise underneath Jim Lehrer’s novel Oh, Johnny. An ignorant but gifted center fielder postpones a minor league career to join the Marines in 1944, falls in love, survives the war, and comes home to find his dreams don’t play out like he dreamt them. Unfortunately, the execution is lacking, with the childish narration masking the dark undertones of war and its psychological ramifications.
The book opens with Johnny Wrigley heading west from his native Maryland on a troop train, en route to his final destination in the Pacific. At a 30-minute stop in Wichita, he disembarks and immediately falls in love with the most beautiful girl he’s ever laid eyes on. The dust jacket states “they share an intimacy that Johnny will treasure for the next two years at war.” Sharing might be putting it strongly. Two chapters into the story we trip over the book’s first–and highest–credibility hurdle: Why an innocent Kansas girl would let Johnny deflower her in a train station storage room.
When their two minutes of passion are over, Johnny proclaims his sincere love while Betsy weeps and prays for forgiveness. He zips up and bolts for his train, which is now pulling out of the station. His seatmate, who just half an hour earlier was inquiring whether Johnny had ever done “it,” now smells the guilty pleasure (despite being a virgin himself) as his friend slides past. Johnny, oblivious to the torture he has put his beloved through, is off in dreamland.
His “Betsy luck” somehow keeps him alive through the horrors of Peleliu and Okinawa. When Johnny returns from the war he stops in Kansas and searches for her to no avail. He does happen to stumble into Lawrence Stadium, home of the National Baseball Congress Championship, which miracle of miracles, he plays in the very next year as a member of the Blue Ridge Drivers, the semi-pro club he’s had to settle for after a horrific collision with the center-field wall knocked him out of the minor leagues.
Johnny’s master plan to locate his Betsy is to ask his coach to somehow get his picture in the newspaper so she’ll find him. His scheme works, though it turns out she’s quite different from the fantasy he’d remembered. After obsessing over her for three years, he can’t get away from her fast enough. He returns to Maryland sadder and wiser, and it’s here that the book gathers a little steam. Unfortunately, it’s almost over.
When Johnny’s anguish from the war and his baseball injuries seeps through he finally gains some character. After coming off as a cross between Forrest Gump and Dobie Gillis for the first 200 pages, Johnny at last merits a little empathy. On the whole, however, it’s too little, too late.
Oh, Johnny might have worked better in comic book format. The inane references to his hero Pistol Pete Reiser might not be quite so irksome in a dialogue balloon. I counted 30 mentions of Reiser and nearly as many to “Miracle Whip,” which in Johnny and his grocer mother’s lingo means something really special or miraculous. In my lingo it’s a fine substitute for “annoying, cornball redundancy.”
Most of the baseball action in Oh, Johnny could fit in a Matt Christopher book. Unfortunately, this isn’t The Kid Who Only Hit Homers. Equally implausible most of the time, but without the endearing qualities.
This is Lehrer’s 19th novel. He’s better known as the anchor of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. I can’t speak to his previous 18 releases, but based on this one, I prefer him behind a news desk.
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Thank you. Won’t waste space in my reading list on that one….
It’s hard to find good, new baseball fiction these days. Very disappointing. If anyone has any recommendations for good baseball fiction from 2009, please share them.
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