cover image The Cleveland Indian: The Legend of King Saturday

The Cleveland Indian: The Legend of King Saturday

Luke Salisbury. Smith, $24.95 (285pp) ISBN 978-0-912292-95-3

The 1897 Cleveland Spiders were a talented baseball team, and Salisbury's vividly rendered first novel captures the players, the memories surrounding them and the American public's burgeoning obsession with baseball at the turn of the century. Salisbury focuses on the fictional relationship between narrator Henry Harrison--the team's lawyer and a self-described ``Krank,'' as fans were called in those days--and the charismatic King Saturday, the club's raucous, unpredictable and doomed American Indian superstar. Modeled after Lou Sockalexis--considered the first Native American major-leaguer and a real star for the Spiders in 1897 (you can look it up)--Saturday is rendered as a magisterial but unknowable figure of tremendous physical skills and enigmatic motivations. The character of 19th-century baseball--the aggressive tactics, hard-drinking players and pervasive gambling--is wonderfully depicted, as are the political tensions and social strictures of the period. Harrison's earnest, crisp narrative voice is appealing. There are some flaws: certain sections--Harrison following Saturday to the steaming jungles of Cuba, for example--seem almost a parody of the adventure novel. It's also unfortunate that we get to know the extraordinary King Saturday only through his schemes and his awesome deeds, and never through the articulation of his inner life. (May)