Then, he says, ''I imagine Eddie Scissons has decided, 'If I can't have what I want most in life, then I'll pretend I had it in the past, and talk about it and live it and relive it until it is real and solid and I can hold it to my heart like a precious child. Kinsella also lavishes his pleasure on Eddie ''Kid'' Scissons, a creaking, ancient Iowa gent who has passed himself off for years as ''the oldest living Chicago Cub.'' When Ray discovers the Kid's story is a fabrication, an elaborate patch on an anonymous career in the lower minors, he is at first angry. Graham appears in the book, wholly in the present, as a kindly old doctor in a Minnesota town near the Canadian border and as a freckled youngster taking the field with Jackson and the Black Sox on Ray's farm.

He invents a life for a long-dead player named Moonlight Graham who played half an inning for the New York Giants in 1905. It's a love story, really the love his characters have for the game becoming manifest in the trips they make through time and space and ether. Kinsella is drunk on complementary elixirs, literature and baseball, and the cocktail he mixes of the two is a lyrical, seductive and altogether winning concoction. This accomplished - at what appears to Salinger to be gunpoint - the farmer and the writer begin to hear voices together, and they set off, wary partners at first, co-conspirators as the book progresses, to unpeel a few layers of the game's lure and charm. Salinger in his New Hampshire hermitage and take him to a ball game. Then a voice tells him to ''ease his pain,'' and Ray takes this to mean that he should go find J.D. First, Ray builds a ball park on a few acres of his Iowa corn farm and populates it in his mind with the disgraced heroes of the 1919 Black Sox, most notably Shoeless Joe Jackson. ''Shoeless Joe'' concerns a moonstruck man named Ray Kinsella (Should we presume a kinship between author and protagonist? You bet we should) who hears voices and heeds what they say. KINSELLA was born for fiction, or at least for this book.

Shoeless joe jackson kinsella