Customer Reviews

The Sportswriter: Bascombe Trilogy (1)

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(22)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

Taking place entirely over Easter weekend in 1983, "The Sportswriter" portrays Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old man living in bland suburbia and suffering from the inertia and "dreaminess" of a mid-life crisis. The theme of middle-aged, middle-class male angst has pretty much become a genre unto itself (see John Updike, Philip Roth, Frederick Barthelme, et al.), and I confess that I've grown somewhat weary of it, but what rescues Ford's entry into the field is his compelling and wry prose.

Like the author himself, Bascombe hails from Mississippi, lives in New Jersey, published a well-received collection of short stories earlier in life, and works as a writer for a glossy sports weekly. There the resemblances between author and protagonist apparently end. Bascombe is suffering: he is still reeling from the loss of his son four years earlier and the subsequent demise of his marriage after his wife discovered evidence of his infidelity. He's the type of guy who knows a lot of people but has no real friends, and his male reserve prevents him from confronting the tragedies experienced by his family, the lingering feelings for his ex-wife, and the emotional vacuity of his life. Instead of therapy, he escapes to a fortune-telling psychic; unfortunately, she seems to be away for the weekend.

During the course of three days, Frank reunites with his wife briefly for the anniversary of his son's death. He travels to Detroit both for business (to conduct an interview with a permanently disabled football player) and for a short holiday with his latest girlfriend Vicki. The trip is a disaster on both counts. When he returns, Frank finds himself an unwilling confessor to the emotionally unstable and clearly distraught newest member of The Divorced Men's Club--a loose and unofficial support group to which both men belong.

In spite of the self-professed apathy of its narrator, the book boasts some extraordinarily touching and even occasionally humorous moments--such as the conversation between Frank and his son when the latter catches him spying outside his ex-wife's house, or the uncomfortable moment when Vicki finds Frank going through her purse. But the book is not without its missteps. Frank sublets part of his home to a black divinity student from Africa, whose almost ghost-like and peripheral presence in the novel seems, at best, gratuitous.

Although a lot happens to Frank over one holiday weekend, the aloof and defensive tone of its narrator can, at times, make his life seem more sluggish than it really is. To me, Bascombe's mid-life experiences--indeed, his entire milieu--seem like depictions from an alien world, but Ford somehow manages to create a convincing portrait of the unmoored life in a self-created purgatory.

Okay, ladies: in spite of the title, go right out and buy this book. If you've ever complained that you just don't understand what makes men tick, The Sportswriter was meant exactly for you.
Frank Bascombe's young son has just died, his marriage has crumbled, and his promising career as a novelist has failed - and the guy's only in his late 30s. Depressing, right? Right. For sure. Sooooo, why bother, you might ask? Answer: Frank has a rich inner life that makes you want to stick with him. This is where his problems originate. We know he is sensitive (these days, we'd say he has a well-developed feminine side) and cares about the pleasures of life's small moments - but he's got a typical male problem: He can't express this side of himself to those closest to him, resorting to moral dishonesty rather than expose himself as a caring human.
Read it, ladies. Then read the sequel, Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer in 1996. But read this one first. It's important.

Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter" by now has become the only slightly less heralded prequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning "Independence Day". While critics have been nearly unanimous in their praise for Ford's breakthrough novel, readers have been more divided about its merits. Some allege its lack of plot, others complain about the seemingly interminable stream of consciousness styled interior monologue of its central character. But what makes failed novelist turned sportswriter Frank Boscombe such an enduring figure in American literature may be his more than passing resemblence to Willy Loman and his litany of everydayman insecurities. Surely, the dank whiff of failure about Frank's middle aged crisis struck existence is a condition that most educated American males can relate to.

Bereaved of a child and divorced from a wife (referred to only as X) whom he still vaguely regards as part of his environment, Frank finds himself drifting into a permanent state of "dreaminess", which when he explains himself turns out to be a place we've all been before though few would care to admit it. X and sportsmen in general, he calls factualists. Their lives are purposeful, defined, nailed down by very specific goals. Sportswriting allows Frank to abdicate from making any real decisions because his duty is only to report. Should it surprise that Frank scores a big zero on the relationship front ? Dreaminess isn't conducive to the making of any real friendships. With women, there's at least sex, though his fling with Vicky proves to be another rudderless affair. With men, there's even less incentive to fake interest. When fellow divorced men's club member Walter confesses his dark secret, Frank doesn't want to know, so when Walter finally chucks it in, Frank's response is one of incomprehension.

The quality of Ford's writing is consistently excellent and never less than satisfying. Literate, sensitive and honest, he manages even to win sympathy for a hero whom many less charitable may regard as a wimp. For all Frank's faults, we root for him because we recognise something of us in him. The novel ends on a hopeful note which leaves a smile on our face. "The Sportswriter" is a wonderful novel.

Frank Bascombe, the sportswriter of the title, is a 38 year old suburban white male who has lost a 9 year old son to Reyes Syndrome and abandoned his marriage after his wife discovered his infidelity. The events of the book, meager as they are, take place on Easter Week in 1983. Frank visits an ex-athlete for a story, visits his girlfriend's family & deals with a distraught fellow member of the local Divorced Men's Club. Along the way he gives a running (and running and running) narrative about his envy of athletes' ability to stay "within themselves" & compares it to his own sense of "dreaminess" or alienation from himself and his life.

Bascombe is a prime example of what C.S. Lewis called "Men without Chests". He is a hollow man, empty at the core of his being. He has no friends. He does not believe anything or in anything. And he is in a state of flight from the responsibilities (to wife, children & career) that provide the only anchors in his life. He represents everything that is wrong with the self-centered, irresponsible, unbelieving men of his generation. He is a man in need of a good bitchslap and in fact, the highlight of the book comes when his girlfriend cold cocks him.

Ford is such a good writer that even though Frank is excruciatingly annoying and his narrative goes on much too long, we can't help getting caught up in the story. But the book is ultimately unsatisfying because Ford himself does not take an editorial stand in regard to Frank. Is the book meant to be a satirical look at Frank? Or is Frank speaking in Ford's own voice & telling us how Ford feels about modern life?

In the epilogue we find out that Frank has basically quit his job, moved to Florida & is involved in a relationship with a 21 year old college student. How can this further retreat from responsibility be seen as redeeming him?

I finished the book feeling that Ford had brilliantly laid bare the pathology of a certain type of modern male, but since I fail to see any change for the better in Frank, it seems a purely cautionary tale.

GRADE: C

This is an example of a book's title misrepresenting the product. When I told people I was reading this, many unfamiliar to the author said that they didn't like sports books. This is not a sports book. It's a book based on human emotion, isolation, and need. The main character, written in the first person narrative just so happens to hold down that job. The book is heavy on the narrative end with very sparse dialog. By doing this the author creates a psychological work where a broken marriage, deceased son, writer's issues are all examined. This book was so well written that I admired many of the passages and re-read them directly after reading them the first time. This is a very good read for all, men, women, sports fans and fans of Martha Stewart.

Richard Ford is a great writer. This book was considered a marvel in its time, a writers book passed around by writers, though it didn't have much "buzz" beyond the fiction writing community. Seeing it on here makes me want to take off a day, go by the beach and reread to end up the way Mr. Bascomb does. There is something in the modest respect for the real details of life and its limitations and an eye for the realities of life in this and all of Ford's work.

Of course, this is necessary reading because Ford's sequel with the same character, married and a decade or so later was his Independence Day that won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, a larger more ambitious work, but with the same accuracy, modesty, and wisdom.

I read Independece Day first, and I loved it. It is in my Top 5 books of all-time. The Sportswriter, however, is a whole different kettle of fish. The quiet narrative voice that seemed to speak page after page of eloquent truths in Independence Day here just seems juvenile and a little dull. I like the narrator, Frank Bascombe, and began reading The Sportswriter with an interest in and concern for him, and even still the book couldn't hold my interest. Midway through, I felt I was slogging along only for a sense of completion. There are some powerful passages and some lovely moments in this book, but on the whole, it just feels empty and solemn. The worst thing about it, ultimately, is a character named Vicki, who unfortunately gets a starring role. She is meant to be a woman from Texas, and her dialogue is written in dialect (!) with frequent use of the word "ain't" and "g"s omitted from the ends of words (learnin, speakin, patronizin). She is, I think, supposed to sound "country" but instead she sounds like an inbred kissin' cousin from Appalachia. Like most of the women in this book, her character is silly and one-dimensional, a false and cliché notion of a perky girl from Texas. It's just insult to injury for this to come from Richard Ford, a writer of tremendous talent and sensitivity.

THE SPORTSWRITER is a literary, philosophical examination of four days in the life of Frank Bascombe, a nice, ordinary guy who lives in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey, about halfway between New York and Philadelphia. In about two weeks, on May 4, 1984, Frank will be 39 years old. Frank has been divorced for about two years, his X has custody of their two surviving children; the third died four years earlier from Reye's syndrome. Frank enjoys being a sportswriter, and he is happy with his new girlfriend, Vicki, who he has known for two months.

Enough happens to Frank to engage the reader in his story, things that might happen to any ordinary guy. This book is not about plot, though. It's about Frank's philosophy, which puzzled me for a while, it seemed murky, a little fuzzy perhaps, until I realized my own approach to life has been pretty much like Frank's, although I'm too old now to remember thinking about it if I ever did. Then, in the end, Frank has a brief conversation with Catherine Flaherty that makes everything crystal clear, sharp as a tack.

Ford investigates the nature of mystery, anticipation, literalism and factualism. For example, Frank thinks "...mystery, first winded, then ruined by fact. I would rather stay on the side of good omens, be part of the inexplicable, an unexpected bellwether for whatever is ahead. Discretion, oddly enough, is the best response for a man of stalled responses."

As in many literary works, there is a bit too much sensory detail at times for my taste, and sometimes the long stretches of interior monologue within dialogue lost me; I had to go back and find out what the conversation was about. But with Ford's superb writing, I didn't mind.

Throughout dialogue however, nearly all the characters consistently inject the name of the person spoken to. For example:

"I came down through Pemberton and Rambler, Wade."
"Isn't it something, Frank?"

This seems stilted, quirky and eventually as irritating as someone who must clear their throat every ten words or so. If that's how they talk in Jersey, I'll stay afar, thank you, Richard."

Also in dialogue, there are frequent clever rejoinders, lovely literary twists; "jokey-quippy-irony" stuff (Ford p283). Unfortunately, several characters are so accomplished, and therefore the voice that grabs is not theirs, but the author's.

Overall, THE SPORTSWRITER is engaging and beautifully written. I'm looking forward to reading the sequel, INDEPENDENCE DAY.

Three years ago, at age 37, while in the midst of mourning the end of a 10 year marriage and daily contact with my two children, I discovered Richard Ford and the character of Frank Bascombe. The parallels of Independence Day & my then current life were almost too much to handle. Starting with The Sportswriter and moving right into Independence Day, gave me insight into the human (male) condition and my own psyche that I could not have done on my own. Richard Ford writes beautifully and presents a complex picture of a seemingly mundane modern life. This is not an easy book to read. If your tastes run towards Tom Clancy and his ilk, you probably will not like Richard Ford and the world of Frank Bascombe. Give this book time. Your patience will be rewarded.

At some point in The Sportswriter, the title character talks about feeling "a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel." That, I think, is what Richard Ford's novel tries to do. The Sportswriter is a snapshot of a man's undramatic life in middle age, an attempt to make it knowable.

There are those (well represented among the one star reviewers at this site) who become bored by novels that lack a conventional plot -- a murder mystery to solve, an alien invasion to defeat -- but it isn't fair to complain (as have many at this site) that "nothing happens" during the course of The Sportswriter. Plenty of things happen during the short time span the novel covers: Frank Bascombe visits his son's grave, takes a trip to Detroit with his girlfriend, interviews a mentally shaky former athlete, has Easter dinner with his girlfriend's family, gets punched in the mouth, has significant conversations with his ex-wife and an old girlfriend, endures a male friend's unwelcome advance, chats with a teenage girl after a car knocks a shopping cart into the phone booth he occupies, flirts with an office intern ... nothing terribly exciting, no bombs to disarm or terrorists to defeat, just the random events of a life. But as Frank muses about those events, and as he recalls other events that shaped his life in ways large and small, we come to know him, to understand him ... and, with luck, we may understand ourselves or our friends and family a bit better for the effort of examining Frank's life.

It's unusual and oddly comforting to read a novel about a man who is basically content with his life, who is neither cynical nor self-loathing, who is trying to live decently and who admits his mistakes. What The Sportswriter lacks in dramatic tension it makes up for with insightful examination: of attitudes, emotions, lifestyles, relationships. It is filled with lessons: happiness comes from living in the moment without the distracted wondering about other, better moments that might exist; an attempt to know everything about another person during a one night stand becomes a miserable substitute for self-knowledge; the future is a mystery to be embraced; the "world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being." Yet for all the lessons Frank has learned, he's living a deliberately isolated life; he professes to like people but most often stands apart from them. Frank claims that to be a sportswriter "is to live your life mostly with your thoughts, and only the edge of others'." Frank doesn't understand that his superficial relationships are not caused by his chosen profession. As a defense mechanism against pain, he lives his life largely within his own mind (a state he describes as "dreaminess"), yet he desperately wants to feel close to (and even marry) a girlfriend who he knows isn't right for him. Frank clearly has more to learn, and that too, I think, is one of the book's lessons.

Finally, as even most of the negative reviewers here acknowledge, the novel is beautifully written. Ford has a pitch-perfect ear for dialog and regional speech patterns. I think The Sportswriter is a remarkable achievement. Although it isn't the right novel for readers who crave fast action or a plot-driven story, I admired it immensely, and so I give it five stars.