Blind Baseball

This novel about no-fault divorce in Michigan sounds fairly realistic. We may have to buy it. Link. Two excerpts:

1. The story's hero, Barry Ballinger, has, to say the least, a troubled marriage. His wife, Sal, serves him with divorce papers, empties their bank account, and spitefully runs up huge debts in his name. She also means to take custody of their six children. And that's just the beginning of her campaign to ruin, humiliate, and utterly destroy him.

Barry goes to a lawyer, who tells him that under Michigan's no-fault divorce law his chances of getting custody of the children are almost nil. Originally intended to level the playing field and make the dissolution of marriage as painless as possible, the law actually has the opposite effect: It gives women like Sal, who know how to play the angles, huge legal advantages. It also serves the interests of predatory men, like the sponging lovers Sal brings into the home once Barry has been expelled. The horror is that Barry is punished for trying to be a responsible father.

2. Blind Baseball is to domestic law what Nineteen Eighty-Four is to politics. It vividly shows how bureaucratic "social services" can be perverted into tools of raw power over the unsuspecting individual. At first Barry naïvely assumes the basic fairness of the system; he is quickly disabused by the successive hammer-blows of Sal's cunning malice.

What makes this more than a mere divorce novel is Green's grasp of the systematic nature of the forces Barry faces. Slowly he comes to realize that he's up against something more than a flaw in the system: This is just how the system is designed to work.

Maybe Scheske's law office should give the book to clients who come to the office looking for a divorce. It might give everyone a hint of what's happening.

Blind Baseball: A Father's War