Sport

Growing up in St. Paul, Minn., in the 1960s, 12-year-old Harlan Hawkins (""Sport"" to his father) is having a bad summer. His mother has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, his alcoholic lawyer father has erupted in physical abuse and his obese, older brother, Gerard, is numbing his depression with cigarettes and alcohol. Harlan's only respite from his dismal home life is on the baseball diamond, ""where miraculous comebacks were always possible, where I still knew the rules."" In a spare but affecting first-person narrative, Cochrane's second novel (after Flesh Wounds) is a winning coming-of-age tale that falters only occasionally. After Harlan's father decamps and neglects to pay child support, his mother's advancing disease leaves the family home a shambles and their finances seriously impaired. Cochrane renders the conditions of Harlan's impoverished childhood with a laid-back, unpretentious grace. It's understandable that Harlan needs a means of psychological escape, which he finds in his baseball card collection (""they weren't so much things to possess as a place to be""). He also receives support from his neighbor and baseball coach, George Walker, who decides to take the boy under his wing and helps get him into a local private school on scholarship. The novel doesn't quite achieve the depth and scope it aims for: one might wish to penetrate the psyche that guides Walker's altruism, or to experience the genuine pain that lies behind Gerard's moody, embittered facade. However, obvious parallels to Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life should attract readers who will then be seduced by the unassuming richness of Cochrane's prose and his gift for subdued yet potent storytelling. (Jan. 12)