In today’s fiction there is a certain kind of book. This modern sub-set of book is about 500 pages long in (entirely unnecessary) size 14 font with (even more unnecessarily) double-spaced lines. And it always deals with young, American people at college. Think Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot and you have the sort of book I’m talking about.

Now, there isn’t anything wrong with this: for a during-term bed-book there is very little better. You don’t have to think hard. You barely have to think at all. You can even start to see the American “colleges” that serve as the only settings in them as Kings, Pembroke, St Catharine’s…‘They are talking about me!’ a student reader gasps.

This is not what The Art of Fielding sets out to be. Unfortunately, it is what it becomes. The novel took ten years to write, and, to quote the Guardian review, “may be the first debut novel to have another book written about it before it was even published.” It is bordering on being the most hyped book of the year. But Chad Harbach, co-founder of the literary journal, n+1 magazine, could have done a little better on his first attempt.

The novel is about a young man, a high-school student, Henry Skrimshander, who is abnormally good at baseball. Spotted at a match in a “no-name tournament” by Mike Schwartz, an athlete of Westish College who has ruined his joints playing sports, Skrimshander is whisked from his limited-prospects life to “play ball”, to “live his dream”. There he is cast into a dorm-room with Owen: exceedingly bright, gay. He encounters the college president, Professor Affenlight: a 60 year old Melville scholar who has written the (frankly gratuitously titled) critical work, Sperm-Squeezers, about homo-eroticism, (who, in turn, thinks he might be gay). The fifth ‘perspective’ is that of Professor Affenlight’s daughter, Pella: dependent on “sky-blue pills” because of her failed marriage.

As one expects from “the campus novel”, things go from bad to worse. Skrimshander, after matching the record for most error-less games, set by his own baseball hero, makes his first mistake. A bad throw smashes into Owen’s skull and sends him, concussed, to hospital (along with Affenlight in loco parentis) where a romance between the teacher and student blossoms. Romantic bliss, perhaps, but misguided and brief. Meanwhile, this slip sends confident Henry into a crisis of self-doubt, unable to throw with his former skill, and he leaves Schwartz questioning his own life-choices. This questioning then threatens his relationship with Pella. All in all, paradise seems determined to crumble.

And this point in the novel it was very, very, very tempting to give up, to copy and paste a review from some obscure online-blog and send it to the Varsity offices. This can only go one way, I thought: as the precedent of High School Musical dictates, the rag-tag baseball team will win this national championship. And sure enough they did.

Predictability of plot aside, the writing is often sloppy and the dialogue, a tad wooden. There are good passages: when Mike calls Pella to ask her if she is free to go out, there is a spark of brilliance:

“‘Free? Heavens, no. After a capella practice I’ll be volunteering down at the soup kitchen while I finish my paper on the theme of revenge in Hamlet. Then my sorority has a mixer with the Alpha Beta Omegas, my bulimia support group is getting together for dessert, and after that I have a date with the captain of the football team.’

‘I’m the captain of the football team.’

There was a long pause.

‘Oh. Well, in that case. What time can you pick me up?’”

But with 500 pages of writing, it’s hardly surprising that there is something good.

Perhaps it’s me. Baseball is an American obsession. I know nothing about the game at all. But this book is billed as being “not just about baseball”. It’s supposedly a novel about working hard, about trying and trying again and again. It is easy to read, and nicely relaxing, but The Art of Fielding is not the book of the year, it is an over-hyped cliché.

4th Estate, £16.99, hardback