The Sportswriter

The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

Featured on the Time Magazine Top 100

                Frank Bascombe, the central character of The Sportswriter, is a difficult individual to pin down.  He is an individual who seems to care very deeply about the people in his life, but is also extremely self-centered. I guess it is in that conflict of self that the novel finds the bulk of the tension. It certainly isn't the plot, which meanders from point A to point B at a glacial pace.  

                The novel opens with Bascombe, at the start of Easter weekend, meeting his ex-wife at the grave of their dead son...whose grave is right next to Bascombe's backyard. Clearly, we as readers are being set up. We are beginning with a past that did not work, filled with pain, and a future that begins with rebirth on Easter. And, yes, that is kind of what happens. Here is the plan. Bascombe wants to leave the graveyard, pick up his girlfriend to go on a romantic (sort of) trip to Detroit, come back, and have a nice meal with his girlfriend's family. And for the most part, that is exactly how this goes down. But, because we open at a graveyard we have to deal with the past. I expected that most of the flashbacks would deal with Bascombe's relationship with his son, but instead the focus of the flashbacks is mostly on career and relationship choices. Initially, it turned out, Bascombe had wanted to be a novelist. He had written a highly regarded book of short fiction, had gotten married and moved to a quiet community where he was treated like a rising star in the literary world before he decided to abandon his novel and write for a sports magazine. The expectation of a reader would be that Bascombe would look back on this as a mistake, that writing for the magazine would seem like taking the path of least resistance, and he would look back at that choice as a compromise. But for the most part he is completely satisfied with his career. He also talks about his marriage to a woman who is referred to in this novel only as "X." His marriage to X seems to be a happy one from what Bascombe chooses to reveal. However, after the death of their oldest son, he engages in a series of affairs and the marriage unravels. Again, this is not something that Bascombe treats with any real sense of regret, or, maybe more accurately he does not take the blame. 

                There are a couple of ways to look at this. One is that he is a callous character, and sometimes I definitely opted for this interpretation. Another, is that he is living in the moment, and that while he is aware of his past, he is trying to move forward. Neither interpretation makes him a likeable character. Indeed, there are many times throughout the course of the novel that I thought he was kind of a scumbag. But as he goes about his Easter weekend it is hard not to root for him to make choices that will make his life better, or at the very least make him feel more fulfilled. The story does throw some curveballs at Frank. A member of a divorced men's group confides in him that he has just had a homosexual encounter after his wife left him. An interview subject that Frank was supposed to be writing an article about turns out to be mentally unhinged. Frank's doctor, who he personally despises, may be having an affair with X.

                I did not enjoy this book as much as I wanted to. Frank Bascombe is an interesting character, but I had a really hard time identifying with him when he talked about how he dealt with bad things in his life. And the novel is so in his head, that if you aren't sold on him as a character, you will not find reading the book a rewarding experience. This is actually the first book in a trilogy. The second book, Independence Day, won the Pulitzer for 1996. That will be the next book I write up. I think it is telling that I do not have a burning interest to read the third book. It was announced in 2007 that HBO would turn the three novels into a 6-part miniseries, and it would be directed by James Mangold. That was 2007, so I am assuming that the project fell apart.

                                                         

Coming soon: Independence Day by Richard Ford.