It Happened in Wisconsin
From his room in a nursing home, the narrator of this spellbinding novel looks back on his youth as a pitcher on a Midwestern regional baseball team during the Depression. No ordinary team, the players treat each other as equals and decline to have a manager. They give away as much of their take from each game as they can to local needy families. But their socialist dream is threatened when, forced to stop at an inn in a Wisconsin snowstorm, a fellow guest tries to lure one of the best players away from the team. The unnamed narrator weaves the story of that night with his memory of his love affair with Nancy, a waitress in Binghamton, circling around as he steadily reveals that these were the pivotal events in his life. This isn't a happy story, but it's an engrossing, satisfying one.