You've got to attend closely to Jerome Charyn. He's ambitious, daring, but quietly so. "The Seventh Babe" starts out as a fairly conventional baseball novel but modulates into something more strange and wonderful and decidedly south-of-the-border. (p. 12)

[Well] before the book is half over, Mr. Charyn explodes the genre and the reader's expectations. Rags turns out to be neither orphan nor hayseed, but the son of a copper millionaire. So much for the coming of age of a young ballplayer. Still more disconcerting, the book doesn't end with the close of the season—a formal absolute of the baseball novel—but willfully continues through season after season. Rags becomes the darling of Boston; he gets married; he sours and becomes "the bad boy of baseball"; he gets thrown out of organized ball. The Bildungsroman becomes a Progress. It becomes, as well, something wonderful and strange.

For several books...