The Port Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey lease their stadium to the United States Department of War at the beginning of the 1943 season—to be used as a soldiers' embarkation point—which forces the athletes to play as the league's first permanent road team.

The novel's narrator is "Word" Smith, a retired sports columnist who spends 1943 traveling with the Mundys.

Characters on the Mundys roster are parallels of actual replacement players from the World War II era, such as one-armed outfielder Bud Parusha (Pete Gray).

In 2003, USA Today critic Bob Minzesheimer called the work "one of Roth's least known," and added,[1] Daniel Okrent once wrote that if "40 percent of The Great American Novel is out-of-control, the remainder is unmitigated triumph.

Roth, best known for Portnoy's Complaint and American Pastoral, won a life-achievement medal last fall at the National Book Awards.