In Shoeless Joe, Kinsella is boxed in by his own inventiveness. Having J. D. Salinger sleuth around a baseball mystery is a delightful idea, but a difficult one to execute. The writer has to recite such lines as: "It's a sad time when the world won't listen to stories about good men." Of course, this is W. P. Kinsella, not the real Salinger speaking. To put your own words into a living person's mouth is merely presumptuous, not clever.

Similarly, the flights into fantasy are too easy and obvious. The author wants us to release our reason and break down the barriers between the living and the dead, the prosaic and the mystical. But Ray's alternate universe of baseball is too contrived to be seductive, and the pace is too sluggish to work as a madcap picaresque. Kinsella reaches for the otherworldly magic of Gabriel García M...