Valerie Sayers

Valerie Sayers, author of "The Powers" (James C. Svehla, Chicago Tribune / April 22, 2013)

In "The Powers," Valerie Sayers' long-awaited sixth novel — her first since "Brain Fever" (1996) — the great Yankees slugger Joe DiMaggio is embarking on his historic hitting streak of 1941, riveting Americans as much as or more than the news from Europe, where World War II is gathering its terrible momentum. Like many athletes, Sayers' DiMaggio is deeply superstitious, so much so that he believes he can foresee the future — his own and that of America itself, including the attack on Pearl Harbor.


Other characters in "The Powers" have a similar sense of being caught up in, and somehow connected to, the tide of history. These include the fictional Babe O'Leary, who treks to the Bronx from her neighborhood in Brooklyn in the fervent belief that her attendance at Yankees games helps the team win; her daughter Agnes, who is being courted by two young men and believes that her fate is tied to theirs; and Joe D'Ambrosio, one of her beaux, who yokes his own fate to that of the pacifist Catholic Worker movement as the military draft looms.

A South Carolina native who lived in Brooklyn for much of her adult life, Sayers has been a professor at the University of Notre Dame since 1993. Northwestern University Press, which has published "The Powers" in hardcover as part of its TriQuarterly Books imprint, will also reissue her entire backlist — including "The Distance Between Us" (1994), "Who Do You Love" (1991), "How I Got Him Back" (1989) and "Due East" (1987), all originally published by Doubleday — in paperback this fall. Printers Row Journal recently caught up with Sayers by phone; here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: I gather you've always followed the Yankees, which makes sense for the author of a book about Joe DiMaggio.

A: Yes, the origins of the novel go back to my childhood in South Carolina, where I was a Yankees fan. To be a Yankees fan in South Carolina was to be something of a pariah.

Q: You would have been expected to be, what? A Braves fan?

A: Or perhaps not a fan at all, just a well-behaved girl.

Q: In your early Yankees fan stage, you would have been aware of DiMaggio's aura as a historical figure in the game, but not much else.

A: Yes. By the time I was a young woman in Brooklyn — I moved there in 1971 — he was the spokesman for Mr. Coffee, and that was probably my primary association with him.

Q: But DiMaggio lives pretty large in our collective imagination, even now. Did you feel any special responsibility, or burden, associated with writing about him — as opposed to writing about, say, Satchel Paige or someone else?

A: Oh, I think I'd feel even more of a sense of responsibility if I were writing about Satchel Paige, because people don't know a lot about him. Of course I felt a great responsibility writing about DiMaggio, but I also think people have created their own DiMaggios, the DiMaggio they need. And that's why I included a preface to say that this fictional portrayal of DiMaggio is as accurate as I can make it in terms of the facts, but everything else about it is, by definition, my DiMaggio, my projection onto him. My idea in the book is to explore the way we as Americans think about heroism, what it means to be heroic, and he was this huge hero of the day at this very, very difficult time. Some people have said his hitting streak was kind of a distraction from the war, but I don't think it was that at all. I think it was a way of working through ideas about what it means to act heroically, what it means to go above and beyond.

Q: Another big element of the book is DiMaggio's seeming foreknowledge of events. The reader is left to decide whether this is just superstition, or does it extend into the realm of the supernatural, of actual clairvoyance?

A: Well, I was having some fun with that. I was thinking about the ways we make our sports figures superheroes who can do extraordinary things. We imbue them with such powers, it's as if he could read the future.

Q: But he does seem to know what's going to happen before it does.

A: Yes, and I felt that if I was going to fool around with that idea, I had to actually give him the superpower. That's why it's a novel, and not a biography. Of course, Babe, too, thinks she has powers, and in a way she does.

Q: Some of the other characters also have a sense of knowing what the future will bring. Agnes, for example, somehow knows in advance that the boy she's going to marry is the one she tells first about a family secret.

A: But then, of course, she turns out to be wrong.

Q: Anyway, it might have been natural, at the time, to have a sense that everything was connected — the war is brewing and DiMaggio is on a hitting streak. They're all related, and it all seems like fate, somehow. People connect dots that are not connected, at least in any logical sense, and that becomes part of our world view.

A: Exactly. It certainly was part of DiMaggio's world view, rooted partly in his being Italian-American. He was famous for touching second base on the way out to center field; he had to do it. And of course Babe, with her Irish immigrant roots, had all kinds of cultural and religious superstitions. It's just a big part of the way they imagine the world.