One day while out in his corn field, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella hears the voice of a baseball announcer saying, If you build it, he will come. He refers to Ray's hero, Shoeless Joe Jackson. It is a baseball stadium, which Ray carves out of his corn field.W. P. Kinsella plays with both myth and fantasy in his lyrical novel, which was adapted into the enormously popular movie,
Field of Dreams. It begins with the magic of a godlike voice in a cornfield, and ends with the magic of a son playing catch with the ghost of his father. In Kinsella's hands, it's all about as simple, and complex, as the object of baseball itself: coming home. Like Ring Lardner and Bernard Malamud before him, Kinsella spins baseball as backdrop and metaphor, and, like his predecessors, uses the game to tell us a little something more about who we are and what we need.
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