Customer Reviews

A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. North Point Press San Fransisco 1985

On the surface this is a love story. Phillip Dean, an American dropout from Yale, and Anne-Mari Costallat, a French shop girl, live and love, love, love... for several months in France. As the observer/narrator tells the story, one is never quite certain whether the narrative is an objective account of the life of Phillip and Anne-Mari or a fabricated wish fulfillment of a frustrated stymied paramour of the beautiful Claude Picquet. In the end it doesn't matter as the story ebbs and flows inexorably and smoothly through the shimmering French countryside to its tragic conclusion.

The writing is astounding. I stopped time and again to read and reread passages as the combinations of words and phrases evoked emotions and feelings that I thought not possible given the simplicity and directness of the words. There is a conciseness to both the story and the language. So much is said with so few words that one sometimes regrets that this parsimony of words brings the end too soon. I wanted the novel to continue so I might continue to savor this beautiful writing.

A wonderful novel that I will continue to read for years to come.

In the opening pages an unnamed narrator describes the French countryside and small towns he is traveling through by train. The writing is flawless, sharply observant and evocative of a locale and country that is traditionally linked with romance. As the narrator settles into a rented villa and begins to explore the night life of the small village he has decided to spend some time in we become aware of a peculiar habit of mind he has. The narrator likes to imagine the inner and private lives of strangers he meets. This is woven into the narrative in a way that makes it exciting to read as you don't always know just how much of what he relates is observation and how much created out of an imagination fueled by some personal need to embellish. The narrator is dedicated to a life of inaction so much so that he is relieved to find the woman he admires from a distance is no longer available. The books title is taken from the Koran and as Salter says in his autobiography is meant to be ironic as in its context it is meant to refer to the insignificance of this life in comparison to the life to come. But the narrator is no follower of traditional thought or beliefs and his only pastime is that habit of mind. Entering into his world is his exact opposite Dean. Outwardly handsome, exuding a sense of adventure, recently arrived from Spain, and immediately gaining the attention of women he also gainds the attention of our narrator. The two become friends....apparently. For here the clues as to what is observed and what is imagined becomes grey. Nevertheless this is not a distraction, rather it makes for an intriguing complexity to the narrative. Dean is soon involved in an affair which is highly charged, almost purely physical in its nature. Dean and Anne-Marie frolic in every way imaginable, including the favorite way of that most depraved of Frenchman, Sade. All could well be an invented affair but maybe not. The writing is so succinct and yet so rich in detail that as a reader you really don't care. It is a good sexy story. Eventually Dean who has been living out of his rich American fathers pockets must return to America but what a ride it has been. Dean leaves his rare sportscar in the care of our narrator but as soon as Dean is gone the car shows signs of decay. Every detail of this story from the descriptions of the French towns to the weather, which is often foul, to the sex scenes and trips to Paris is exceptionally told. This book has enough interesting aspects to be much longer but unfortunately it does end.

Like Salter's other novels, this book is a study in hero worship. Here the hero is not a fighter pilot ("The Hunters") or an alpine mountain climber ("Solo Faces") but a lover, whose intensely erotic affair with a young French woman is imagined by the novel's narrator, a casual friend who scarcely knows him. Phillip Dean (like a real-life counterpart James Dean) is in his twenties, good looking, intelligent, and with a fatal attraction to fast cars. (Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's "On the Road" also comes to mind.)

As a movie, this would be NC-17 material. Far from romance, it's a graphic portrayal of the unpredictable interplay of desires and emotions between two people physically attracted to each other. And in its fascination with the shifting moods of lovers consumed by their passions, it is "very French."

Though published, and apparently set, in the 1960s, the book captures the look and feel of post-war France. The provincial towns where it takes place are lifeless and silent, seemingly exhausted. Salter's gift for seizing sharply drawn impressions from fleeting images makes the settings almost jump from the page. Written in present tense, his sentences are short and often fragmentary. While evoking the great weight of history, his images have the immediacy of the present. An American reader who has traveled in Europe will recognize the emotions Salter describes.

Meanwhile, the story is layered with ironies. The narrator himself seems to have a life that is almost empty of eros, and he reminds us that for all its graphic detail, he has imagined all the intimacies of Dean and Anne-Marie's affair. Maybe the lesson in this has to do with our own perceived inadequacies and voyeuristic curiosity about the private lives of others, especially celebrities and public figures. Almost 40 years later, Salter's novel stands up very well today, its vision and its ambiguities more pointed than ever.

In the introduction to the Modern Library edition, Salter stated he was trying to write a book of imperishable images and obsessions-- which contrasted the ordinary from the divine. Existential, surreal, expressionist, emotionally abstract, all these terms can be applied inadequately to the result. Set around France, it follows a footloose Yale dropout's relationship with a young shopgirl. It is a passionate shambles of impressions and reflections. The book's sparsity fills volumes. The third person, subjective narrative merges with the thoughts of the protagonist, always focused on sensuality and fragility. Like a dissonance of the will and conscience, it all seems imagined. Braced by precise language, compressed to a critical mass, Salter's withering insights release sudden visual eruptions. This tale is an intensely philosophical look at life, outlined by a passing love affair. Writing that has achieved this level of density and inner light is rare. A Sport and a Pastime sparkles and dazzles!

I first read this novel when it was new, in the late sixties, and I liked it because I, too, had been a student in France and had experienced some cross-cultural coupling during those years. I appreciated the evocation of small city life, smoky cafés, dumpy hotels, and all the rest -- and yes, the sex scenes were great.

I've just (autumn 2005) reread the novel again, almost forty years down the line, and I discover a profundity and philosophical depth that escaped me the first time around. I hardly know of a book that better describes the mystery of sexuality, and its connection with the deepest questions of existence. And o yes, the descriptions of smoky cafés and the joys of screwing are still there -- it's just that there's a lot more to Salter's work, which merits the highest praise. The author has attempted to create a transcendent legend from the encounter of two ordinary and even shallow people, and he has succeeded. The influences of Hemingway and Miller are evident, but the true model is classical mythology. Five stars, or ten maybe.

Read this. What distinguishes this book is the narrator, a male Nellie Dean. He is a "writer" who knows he's very, very good; who self-consciously describes the French landscape and people in literary terms - recasting events at will to demonstrate his authority and virtuosity; who pretends he's Stendhal when describing social situations; and who is ultimately confronted by something he is incapable of -- erotic love, not his own, but someone else's. The novel is about what he thinks is important, and how he is in a way undone by the affair of a young American drifter and a French shopgirl.

What are we to make of the narrator's descriptions of their love, their sex? Are they accurate or imagined? If they depict "real" events, how did he learn of them? Are we to believe what he tells us about how he came upon the information? Why can't we dismiss, why are we so drawn in by his exquisite, terse narrative when we also get the sense that he could well be a sicko voyeur? The fact of his sensitivity toward the lovers (perhaps he writes compassionately about the lovers to win his readers over) really shouldn't excuse his crimes, right?

All writers and readers of fiction, of course, are snoops. How delicious it is to spy on others, even if they are not real, and even when the act of spying (or reading) makes us aware of our own shortcomings. I was completely overwhelmed by this one.

I discovered this book purely as a consequence of reading John Irving's 'A Son of the Circus', in which he references this novel with a degree of deference. So I bought it, and was astonished. Salter appears to scale the dizzy heights of his writing with ease, but but the sinews of his efforts are clear. As if each word is wrung to the point of dryness before it can find its place. The starkness of the erotic and sexual encounters counterpoints the otherwise majestic display of how wonderful the English language can become. He rides in the same carriage as Brautigan. A man obsessively seeking a perfection and balance in prose that leaves the reader with a sense of respectful and deserved awe.
A work of inspiration and genius, that serves well when read aloud, in bed, as a literary seduction scene. (A Son of the Circus, Chapter 10, J. Irving)

To mention Hemingway and Salter in the same paragraph is an easy stunt. The latter may admire the former but Salter's dedication to subsurface inquiry and the rendition of natural language so far surpasses Hemingway's stilted dialogue and cliché-ridden textures that it is alarming anyone would want to compare rather than contrast the two. Most Salter readers have come upon the author by accident and been dumbfounded at his obscurity, whereas many of us are well and truly blinded to Hemingway's place in the pantheon. I often wonder when people will rise from Lit 101 stupor and read Hemingway for what he truly was-and cease to be deluded by machismo's favorite lapdog.

For this humble critic, reading Salter's "Light Years" was like listening to Mahler's Fifth Symphony, like seeing Michael Gambon in "The Singing Detective," like embarking on the Ganges during a Varanasi dawn. "A Sport and a Pastime" is not Salter's best work, but after reading the book, the narrator's subtle juxtaposition of Atget's photographs to his own reveals a deft literary conceit that the reader must follow to a logical conclusion. He announces the ultimate of the narrative long before the dénouement, and yet we are drawn in to see how his story will contrast or compare with others. It is not about sex, any more than "Last Tango in Paris" was about sex. The search for carnal pleasure in a country choking on its own equivocal history is masterfully and tragically carried out to the only conclusion possible. It is the rare book in which passion is the only unutterable sentiment, where base desire, lust and money intertwine in futility. Only a voyeur can know this, in the same way that the only person who can describe a traffic accident objectively is a witness on the sidelines. The story told by those in the wreckage has titillation and motive but not a word of truth in it.

Don't be fooled by what seem to be Salter's name-dropping and elitist conceits. They are counterpoints that throw into stark relief the real story that unfolds. There is no finer existentialist novela. If Camus had written about America in a similar fashion, the world might have been a different place.

Salter has an incredible sensuous style, so I'm giving this three stars because I just like how he puts the words together on the page. But for me this books feels utterly dated. It was apparently written in the 1960's and it shows -- disaffected American (Dean) hangs out in France, has lots of erotic yet completely emotionally unfulfilling sex. No one communicates very deeply with anyone, nothing seems to have a point and of course it all ends badly. I suspect it seems much more meaningful if you are a certain sex (not mine) and beyond a certain age.

The sex (did I mention there's lots of it?) is vividly described yet weirdly depressing. Why? Maybe it's because I'm a woman and the woman in this story is treated as an absolute object. There is no real effort made to get into her head, and she appears to exist solely to be a docile receptacle for Dean's sperm. For all the emotional involvement our hero feels for her, he might as well have just bought an inflatable doll. So yeah, I find that kind of depressing.

This was the first Salter novel that I had read, so I did not know quite what to expect. For the first few pages, the short, terse sentences tended to get on my nerves a little as I was thinking, "Okay, here we go -- another Hemingway wanna-be." But it did not take long to recognize a style that was unique to the author. The beauty of the prose and imagery that Salter offers is nothing less than remarkable. Few authors have the ability to completely draw the reader into their world with the masterful skill that I so enjoyed in reading this book. No words are wasted, and each sentence makes the relationship between the characters and the reader a bit more intimate. "A Sport and a Pastime" is, quite simply, the best novel I've read in a very long time. The only question I had when I had finished was: "Why has it taken me so long to discover James Salter?"