Character Clues

Character Analysis

Names

Roy means "king" in French, and in this novel Roy's the king. Then we get guys like Bump, who actually dies in a big bump with an outfield wall, or the Whammer, who is supposed to wham it out of the park but actually ends up getting whammed by Roy's pitches. As we mentioned in our "Symbols" section, Pop Fisher's name is a reference to the ailing Fisher King who's waiting for a savior to heal him.

Memo Paris: what kind of name is that? Pretty exotic and mysterious. Maybe a reference to Prince Paris, whose running off with Helen of Troy led to the Trojan War? Iris Lemon: flowers and fruit. Hmm, fertile and lush. Max Mercy's got no mercy, and Judge Goodwill Banner is the opposite of any goodwill. Rookie pitcher Youngberry is self-explanatory. Malamud seems to be having a good time with this.

Family Life

We don't know much about Roy's early life, but we know that he hates his mother (he calls her a whore) and grew up in an orphanage. This sets us up for knowing that Roy is an isolated guy who's probably pretty vulnerable to any woman who might offer some love. He longs for a wife and family but has no idea how to get that.

Memo, too, seems to only have her uncle Pop in her life. Nobody's family is really mentioned in the novel. Again, it's pretty claustrophobic in its scope, just inside the baseball world. There's a feeling of rootlessness about the major characters except for Iris, who seems to be the sole representative of the idea of family.

Sex and Love

Memo is pretty good at sleeping her way to the top: from Bump to Roy to Gus to the Judge, she seems to have some kind of relationship with everybody in the club's hierarchy. The way Memo withholds sex from Roy shows how manipulative she can be.

Roy is pretty footloose and fancy-free when it comes to sex, too, but he seems to feel more strongly and less strategically than Memo. He's a bit clumsy in his efforts at sex and doesn't seem to know when a woman is ready and when she's not. He's always pawing at Memo, but at least he thinks he's in love with her.

Sex with Iris is happy and relaxed for Roy. The fact that Iris has a daughter, and that daughter has a child, fleshes out Iris as a person and lets us know that she's probably more grounded than anyone in the novel—more capable of love.