The Great American Novel by Phillip Roth is about the great American game of baseball and its players, both good and bad-but mostly bad. In fact, the title of Roth's novel is bitterly ironic, given that the subject of the novel is the worst team of the Patriot League, the bottom-tier league of all of the various baseball leagues playing during the era of World War II. At the beginning of the novel, most of the best players are fighting in the war, and the starting lineup of the Mundys of New Jersey consists of prepubescent teenagers, elderly men, alcoholics, midgets and misfits. Even the Mundys' home stadium is being used by the war effort, so they have to play all of their games on the road. The team's owner has so little confidence in the ability of the Mundys that he sold the stadium to the War Department. The various escapades of the team on the road lead them, at one point, to playing a charity game against the inmates of a lunatic asylum, as well as being pummeled by better teams.
             When their old manager dies, their new manager and pitcher Gil Gamesh tries to convince the league's owner that the team has been infiltrated by communists. Later, it is revealed that Gamesh is himself a Russian agent. He has been trying to demoralize the capitalist people of America by revealing the hoax of the glory of baseball, thus demoralizing America's spirit. The only time the Mundys win are when they cheat, fueled by a mysterious concoction known as "Jewish Wheaties" created by one of the team's young, brilliant, but unfortunately not particularly gifted players. But they are not demoralized-by the end of the novel, the Patriot League has been destroyed, after being tarred and feathered by the House Un-American activities, and the Mundys have lost their final game, yet Roth suggests the power of the Mundy's love for the game lives on. The book is told in the reminiscing voice of a sportswriter tha...