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A Sport and a Pastime

by James Salter, Reynolds Price (Introduction)

3.79 of 5 stars 3.79 · rating details · 1,957 ratings · 294 reviews

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story--part shocking reality, part feverish dream --of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and...more

Paperback, 200 pages

Published August 22nd 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (first published 1967)

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Apr 20, 2011 Eric added it

Shelves: ficciones, travels, shouldreread

NickD’s indictment needs no additional count, so I will only register this novel’s activation of a collegiate boredom, a tedium I associate with a curricular corpus of films—mostly French, half-remembered, all untitled—in which chance couplings play out in an atmosphere of languorous tension and momentous triviality, silences and shrugged ouis. But, much like the boredom of those films, the boredom of Dean and Anne-Marie’s liaison (as distinct from the narrator’s other activities, inventions and...more NickD’s indictment needs no additional count, so I will only register this novel’s activation of a collegiate boredom, a tedium I associate with a curricular corpus of films—mostly French, half-remembered, all untitled—in which chance couplings play out in an atmosphere of languorous tension and momentous triviality, silences and shrugged ouis. But, much like the boredom of those films, the boredom of Dean and Anne-Marie’s liaison (as distinct from the narrator’s other activities, inventions and observations) becomes, with the passage of chapters, tolerable, even at times habitable under the bracing formal cool of Salter’s writing. I like to think that the composer Ned Rorem, an admirer of A Sport and a Pastime, found in Salter’s style what he found in Debussy and Ravel—“a sound paradoxically opulent and lean…sumptuous bones.” I also like that this novel, unlike, say, Guy Davenport’s Bordeaux-set “Some Lines of Virgil,” keeps aloof from sun-drenched sexual pastoral, the slicked and sweltering afternoon of the faun, and instead eroticizes a wintry drizzly France. Salter gives us an erotics of refuge, of shelter—strangers driven into each other’s warmth:

It’s a bitter night. Flats of rain are passing. Heavy drops ring in the gutter outside their window, but they are in a dovecote, they are pigeons beneath the eaves. The rain is falling all around them. Deep in feathers, breathing softly, they lie. His sperm swims slowly inside her, oozing out between her legs.

This is the first book I’ve reviewed but not rated. Awareness of its longueurs and indifference to its lovers cannot cancel the afterglow of its style, or the faint itch to read it again.

As for the car, it's a curious thing--it's registered in the name of Pritchard, 16 bis rue Jardin, and they know him. He's off in Greece for the summer, they think, but they'll handle that, too. Perhaps. It's parked under the trees near the house and locked, but like an old man fading, it has already begun crumbling before one's eyes. The tires seem smooth. There are leaves fallen on the hood, the whitened roof. Around the wheels one can detect the first, faint discoloring of chrome. The leather inside, seen through windows which are themselves streaked blue, is dry and cracked. There it sits, this stilled machine, the electric clock on the dash ticking unheard, slowly draining the last of life. And one day the clock is wrong. The hands are frozen. It is ended.

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Sep 12, 2007 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: men trying to convince women to reconsider the notion that their lowest orifice is a one-way street

I just finished this and the aubible sound my mouth made was "wow". I trust that unconscious audible reaction, and am amazed when I hear it, how pure it is, all that's needed for an honest review. Fantastic sentences. France. Like "On the Road," complete with a male writer's man crush on a mythic Dean, but by proper Yale grad/GI instead of Beat athlete. A page of dated rascism makes it a period piece, as do some classist/sexist passages, but the luscious, lascivious, lovingly rendered buggery de...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Keith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 5-star-reading, ebooks, fiction, 2013

Picking up James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime (1966) rang several soft bells in my mind. I know that at some point in the dim and distant past I had read an essay or review that celebrated his incredible talent. This talent is to be discovered in a small shelf of novels, essays and short stories. Of his five novels Salter has publicly stated that only A Sport and a Pastime has come close to living up to his standards. Despite his small output and his own criticism of it Salter is revered amo...more
Picking up James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime (1966) rang several soft bells in my mind. I know that at some point in the dim and distant past I had read an essay or review that celebrated his incredible talent. This talent is to be discovered in a small shelf of novels, essays and short stories. Of his five novels Salter has publicly stated that only A Sport and a Pastime has come close to living up to his standards. Despite his small output and his own criticism of it Salter is revered among many in the literary community. It is an echo of this reputation that I encountered some years ago. Salter's style in A Sport and a Pastime reminded me of Hemingway and the narrative of Henry Miller. Subsequently I discovered that Salter despises Hemingway both as a writer and as a man and credits his influences as Andre Gide and Thomas Wolfe. Nevertheless, however one describes the style or whatever memories it evokes it is specific, almost compressed. Here Salter describes Paris after the August holidays:

“September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.”

Salter can also be both compressed and brutally succinct as in this: "Her life has no solution. It is like a crime that cannot be undone."

The book itself is one sustained piece of erotica describing an intense love affair between a young French girl and an American tourist. What elevates the book is the incredibly canny method Slater uses to describe their relationship. He employs what must rank as one of the most unreliable of unreliable narrators I have ever encountered. The narrator describes their trysts in elaborate detail but how does he know? The young man never tells him. Is he making it up or merely elaborating? This choice makes the reader a voyeur in the relationship. Despite the almost languid pace of the story behind it there a velocity as the two lovers hurtle along their chosen paths. Brilliant. Salter is now 87 but has a new book out in April.

More information for the curious:
The Paris Review interview: http://is.gd/d0o1oF
A 2012 interview on The Millions Blog: http://is.gd/Awo54p (less)

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Tripp I enjoyed this novel for the reason you mention, the unrelaaible narrator--my copy is margin-marked to that effect from start to finish. It's interest...more
Jan 06, 2013 05:04am

Keith I went back to find this quote as it is, I think, the first moment where the narrator begins to reveal the depths of his unreliabilty. It's beautiful....more
Jan 07, 2013 04:12pm

Tripp Yep, I have the same passage starred in my copy of the book. "A kind of debris," "iron fences of France flashing black in the rain." You're right: bea...more
Jan 07, 2013 04:24pm

Apr 11, 2008 Libby rated it 4 of 5 stars

First of all, this star system aggrieves me. When I hover my cursor over the stars I learn that 3 stars indicates "I liked it" and 4 stars indicates "I really liked it" etc. "Liking" has nothing to do with my sense of this novel, and in fact, isn't even germane in this instance. I didn't like this novel. I still think it's rather amazing.

This novel feels dated in its subject matter, and is beset with passages of casual racism and sexual imperialism that are repugnant to me. The story opens in 19...more First of all, this star system aggrieves me. When I hover my cursor over the stars I learn that 3 stars indicates "I liked it" and 4 stars indicates "I really liked it" etc. "Liking" has nothing to do with my sense of this novel, and in fact, isn't even germane in this instance. I didn't like this novel. I still think it's rather amazing.

This novel feels dated in its subject matter, and is beset with passages of casual racism and sexual imperialism that are repugnant to me. The story opens in 1962 (or '64?)and concerns itself with the sexual exploits of young Phillip Dean, the archetypical WASP golden boy, who is a Yale dropout drifting through Europe, and Anne-Marie, a provincial French teenager, whose sexuality (gray teeth and all) acts as a sort of lodestar for Dean's peregrinations. I couldn't care less than I do about this story, which so many readers (as evidenced by Goodreads reviews) seem to think is the meat of the matter.

BUT...

This story is bookended by and filtered through the first-person narration of our unnamed narrator, a 34 year old American man, who meets Dean at a party in Paris and then hosts Dean at the borrowed country home in which he lives (it is in this town, Autun, that Dean meets Anne-Marie). The novel operates, in a sense, as a reverse The Great Gatsby: here our effaced narrator is not a young man (Nick) who witnesses the tragedy of heroism as embodied by the older, more storied man (Gatsby), but instead, is an older man, mourning time's inexorable erasure of youth through the creative act of witnessing (fantasizing/creating) the heroic younger man (Dean).

The novel is a novel of obsession, which at first seems to fixate on Dean and Anne-Marie's sex. But the novel's true fixation is the power and potentiality (one might say potency) of youth. Our narrator is impotent, and recreates the possibility of virility/vitality through his fantasy of Dean. It's quite sad and moving, actually. The whole book is cast in a sort of half-light, as though the events it recounts are waning even before they begin, or as if, as all things must, they contain the seeds of their own dissolution even in the moment of their brightest shining. Our narrator's fixation on Dean and Anne-Marie is a fixing of time, and a fixing of the timelessness of the sexual moment.

The novel's end, its shift from the promise of authenticity (see "The Real France") to its descriptive passages of the town gone arid, mark, at last, the impossibility of the narrator's project. Devastating.

Salter makes so many other strange, admirable moves in these pages that it would be difficult to enumerate them all (his rejection of constant, linear time; his use of description as tool of narrative authority; his complete rejection of the reader's desire to know more about our narrator). I would never read this novel again, but I come away from it feeling as though I need to reconsider--I am reconsidering--everything a novel can do.(less)

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Feb 01, 2012 M.L. Rudolph rated it 3 of 5 stars

1967. Tender story, beautifully narrated of a privileged young expatriate American's passionate and sensual love affair with an eighteen year-old French woman.

The unreliable narrator is older, 34, and meets Phillip Dean, a Yalie on sabbatical at a pension(?) in the town of Autun. But, the narrator tells us, "None of this is true. I've said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre." And he reminds us periodically that though there may be elements of truth to the tale, he made much of it up fo...more 1967. Tender story, beautifully narrated of a privileged young expatriate American's passionate and sensual love affair with an eighteen year-old French woman.

The unreliable narrator is older, 34, and meets Phillip Dean, a Yalie on sabbatical at a pension(?) in the town of Autun. But, the narrator tells us, "None of this is true. I've said Autun, but it could easily have been Auxerre." And he reminds us periodically that though there may be elements of truth to the tale, he made much of it up for his own vicarious reasons. He created in Dean a hero for his own lost youth. (Lost youth?! He's 34!)

And so we follow Dean on this made-up tale as he meets Anne-Marie and they explore southern France to get away from everyone they know so they can devote themselves to one another body and soul.

Yes, Dean and Anne-Marie do meet and they do disappear on a long sojourn to the south, but the details, the sights and sounds and smells of their intense lovemaking are all constructs of the narrator's imagination. (If Anne-Marie was any younger, I might consider the narrator a pale version of Humbert Humbert.)

Strong visuals. Strong sense of place: I've traveled beside those canals under those poplars; eaten those croissants in those small town cafes; climbed those stairs in those rural inns. Salter's style almost feels cubist, image fragments assembled to create more than the sum of their parts. He demands an attentive reader.

But it would be remiss not to call out Salter for his handling of class and race which made me struggle with the overall story. Those instances are threaded seamlessly through the narration, meaning you could consider such attitudes those of this unreliable, horny narrator as he wishes he was younger, richer, and able to find a lover from among those French women he longingly eyes. But I think not. Those were Salter's views and they detract, for me at any rate, from an otherwise lovingly told story.

Likeable for its time and place. Unlikeable for its embedded bias.

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Dec 15, 2007 Chrissie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

absolutely some of the most beautiful prose ever. seriously. i'm now a james salter devotee.

i'm glad i never had to read this book in a school setting because it's the kind of book that would be completely spoiled by literary analysis. "what phallic symbolism lies in the car?" "who is the narrator?" "how does the imvaginazation of the anus figure into the narrator's detachment from modern society?" blah. blah. BLAH. pick this up and let the language take you. forget the rest.

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Dec 17, 2012 Jason added it

Shelves: read-2011

I meant to take notes on this as I read, but every time I sat down in front of the computer to think about this novel, I was paralyzed. I was thinking about it, but not in a productive way, eager to dive back into it. This is the function of an interesting plot, of the thirty-four year old man narrating the sexual exploits of a corrupt golden-boy who has dropped out of yale with his eighteen year old French mistress. It isn’t that the plot is titillating, but that it is haunting; a sense of beau...more I meant to take notes on this as I read, but every time I sat down in front of the computer to think about this novel, I was paralyzed. I was thinking about it, but not in a productive way, eager to dive back into it. This is the function of an interesting plot, of the thirty-four year old man narrating the sexual exploits of a corrupt golden-boy who has dropped out of yale with his eighteen year old French mistress. It isn’t that the plot is titillating, but that it is haunting; a sense of beauty and a knowledge of the inevitable end of beauty pervades, manifesting in mood swings and weather descriptions—the result of which is a tension which keeps the reader hooked.

But two days later, having had time to stew in the story, to let the tale wash over me and to explore what had happened and the intonations that had predicted it, it is not the plot that flusters my attempt at classification. What trips me up now is the writing and the narrative structure.

The language of this novel is that kind of short, short, long that reminds me of Annie Prouxl (only, you know, this isn’t about the rough and tumble). It is the type of writing that sometimes can grate a little, its tendency towards the poetic sometimes seeming to go too far, but before I can truly be annoyed, before I would think about putting the book down, the small sentences that are so beautifully wrought that I almost want to rebel against them add up into a paragraph, a page, a chapter and it is so finely balanced between the beauty of the description and the language that I cannot help but to forgive the writer, the effect has been accomplished in a way that is almost seamless. This, I think to myself, this is what I should be doing, this is how one goes from the decorative to the narrative, how an observation on the light in a room, the vapid action of a party, or anything else that may seem so trivial is poetic, this is how that becomes integral as more than dressing (which is still, all by itself, important).

Finally I come to the narration, which brings to mind another great novelist, Philip Roth. There is so much of this story that is like American Pastoral, the approach it takes of the envious older man looking at the younger man (in Roth’s novel, he is looking back through time at the younger days of a man the same age as he) and idolizing him while knowing even then that this sort of affection is inherently false and that the image is a construction, even potentially harmful, but not being able to help himself. Unlike that similar novel, this is not done through a frame imposed, but it is an obsession, mirroring that of real life, and unlike the Roth book, it doesn’t assert that it tries to be correct, but it insists on its inherent lack of ability to be so. It is speculation and fantasy and observation smashed together in the narrator’s mind so that he is barely able to function as a person. Finally, this isn’t just a narrator who tags along, ala Nick in The Great Gatsby, but he participates in his own, separate circle, one that doesn’t really include his idol, except for a seemingly insignificant meeting, but rather it is through his own experiences which lend his idol the grandeur he is given. It is this delicate balance of acknowledging the futility of his story while simultaneous indulging in it so wholly that gives the whole novel, despite its many other admirable qualities, its luster and shine.
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Jul 01, 2009 Erik Evenson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Eleven pages into A Sport and a Pastime, the unnamed narrator throws us a curveball: "None of this is true," he says. "I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh." From that point on, I found myself reading with squinted eyes. The lies would be revealing. None more so than the observation/creation by the narrator of the 24-year old Yale dropout, Phillip Dean, one half of the couple that copulates incessantly throughout the book. Phillip occasionall...more Eleven pages into A Sport and a Pastime, the unnamed narrator throws us a curveball: "None of this is true," he says. "I am only putting down details which entered me, fragments that were able to part my flesh." From that point on, I found myself reading with squinted eyes. The lies would be revealing. None more so than the observation/creation by the narrator of the 24-year old Yale dropout, Phillip Dean, one half of the couple that copulates incessantly throughout the book. Phillip occasionally mingles with the other characters of the book--even taking the narrator himself out on a roadtrip of provincial France--but stays mostly by the side (and in the bed) of the second half of the amorous couple, Anne-Marie Costallat, the eighteen-year old French girl from the small town called Autun.
And here is where Salter, as the author, does something pretty brilliant.
The book is told in 1st person, yet we are told throughout by the narrator himself that he is making a lot of this up, including the persona of Dean: "I am not telling the truth about Dean. I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that." These lines are revealing for oh so many reasons. First, what it did was free me up to not care that the book itself was breaking the rule of limits of the 1st person point of view. The narrator describes scenes that he couldn't have possibly witnessed, and the thing is, I don't mind because he said himself that he is making a lot of this up. Then the natural question arises: why? Why break the limits? Why is the narrator making up this persona of Dean, filling the gaps of his observations with explicit details of the love lives between Dean and Anne-Marie? There needs to be a good reason; the reason itself has to forward the story. The answer, of course, is never given to us outright. But we are given some tantalizing clues by the narrator himself. That line about “creating [Dean:] out of my own inadequacies” is a first clue. We continue to read that when it comes to women, the narrator is “like a saxophone player in the marching band, in love with a movie queen.” There are a few encounters that the narrator has with women to illustrate his point. They are dead ends, ending up with the author walking home alone while the women move on to the next guy. None of these encounters end with any sexual encounter, let alone the erotica of a Dean/Anne-Marie tryst.
There is also the issue of the narrator toying with the idea of being with Anne-Marie. It is not a coincidence that the narrator mentions that he was masturbating twice a day the year Anne-Marie was born. And consider this observation from the narrator: “Could she, I have often wondered over the empty plates in restaurants, in cafes where only the waiters remain, by any rearrangement of events, by any accident could she, I dream, have become mine?” Salter does such an incredible job of telling us what is really going on here, without telling us. As I read this, I pictured the narrator forming an idea of this beauty, Anne-Marie, and turning her into something of his own creation. He does so because he can’t talk to her in real life, he can’t conjure up the courage to actually learn anything real about her: “I try to watch her, to isolate elements of that stunning sexuality, but it’s like memorizing the reflections of a diamond.” What is going on in his mind is the ongoing fantasy of the unknown.
So, when Dean so effortlessly wins the affections of Anne-Marie, the narrator forms a full-on obsession. Part jealousy, part admiration (it’s astonishing how often those two things go together), the narrator’s obsession with Dean and his affair take on a life of it’s own. When the narrator describes Dean, what he is really describing is an idealization, a projection of all the things the narrator wants to be: smart, reckless, and attractive. The book then, becomes not just a practice in erotica, but actually a dark account of what envy and solitude can do to a person: “Why, whenever I am idle…do I slowly but inevitably become subject to the power of their acts?” The narrator says it all himself in the final passages of the book: “One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess.”
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Dec 10, 2007 Xio rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: booksfrommy30s

Holy cow, I just finished this over lunch and am struggling with the attempt to actually stay here at work and not just run out into the streets to find a glass of wine and a ticket to europe or somewhere--anywhere else and wear dresses and heels and find lovers in dark corners of dancehalls and...sigh...

One of the finest endings in a novel I've had the pleasure to encounter.

LK made a reference to 'On the Road' and I of course was immediately thinking of Fitzgerald. My mind dwells in details, m...more

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Jan 07, 2008 Susan J. rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Lovers of Consciousness and Conscious Lovers

Shelves: fiction

This book pretends to tell the story of a footloose Yale drop-out and his love affair in France, as seen by his slightly less debonair but wanting friend.

I almost lost faith in it...halfway through (even though great admirers of this book love it for this story alone), because the male fantasy seemed so trite.

But then I realized that this book has an extraordinary secret. A second story begins on page 11, an unwritten narrative unfolds, and if you let it whisper and unravel through the whole bo...more

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Helene Papageorge Every now and then you will find a novelist who writes a narrative with a parallel oh so subtle sub-plot/text or parallel storyline. I was never so lu...more
updated Jan 10, 2008 05:56pm

Susan J. Love the painter analogies! I am so sad that I missed the Seurat drawings exhibition at the MoMA. I've seen a few of them online (not the same of cour...more
Jan 11, 2008 01:05pm

Brad Susan,

I enjoyed you review of this book. I am not yet finished with it and I want to read more of this type! I have been translating the French and h...more
Oct 07, 2008 07:38pm

Jun 01, 2013 Carbon rated it 1 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Apr 21, 2013 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Wow. A blurb on the back names it (my paraphrase) as perfect as any American fiction the reviewer ever had experienced, which sounds the sort of hyperbole to make the hype-weary to roll their eyes. No one could write that who'd read Moby Dick for instance, and even if you hadn't, certainly you'd read Gatsby! Never judge a book by its cover (although this cover is delightfully saucy), but without yet reading it, surely you know it's not the equal of Gatsby!

Until they begin actually to read it. Fo...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Gina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Just finished James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, having read Light Years last week. These are not for the plot driven but for anyone who wants to wallow in luxurious language. Cannot improve upon this review I found on Goodreads: (I'm awaiting this man's first novel!)

"You ever have one of those days where you spend the waning daylight hours staring out of a picture window at nothing in particular, with a far away look on your face, trying to clear your mind with a scotch in one hand and the o...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Mandi rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: post-peace-corps

This is a book that can be enjoyed by someone who feels long confident about love and is now capable of enjoying a story of lust. However, for anyone who feels cynical about love, this story will only make you angry. For someone newly in love, this story will make you sad.

There is technical skill in the writing. However, I could not enjoy the story itself. I just couldn't get over the young french girl's naive belief that the sexual exchanges were a promise of love. Dean was selfish and self-ce...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Ron rated it 5 of 5 stars

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...more

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Jul 23, 2011 Jim Coughenour rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: european-fiction

Spurred by a strand of adulation I read somewhere, I ordered A Sport and a Pastime, a sex idyll set in a French village. Apparently this novel caused something of a stir in 1967, with its precious prose, redolent of novels which use words like "redolent" and its reverent obsession with the minutiae of making love. And before I say anything else, I'll acknowledge that it does cast a certain golden spell. I read it this week mostly on the train back and forth from work; it caught me up immediately...more

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Jun 30, 2011 Tyler Jones rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Our lives are comprised of countless fleeting moments, each burning bright in the noonday sun of the present then quickly fading until, all too soon, our memories bear only the faint shadow of a vague impression of what was. One of the goals of fiction (but not the only goal) is to steal back the moments lost to time and to make them burn again before our eyes with all their original urgency and emotion. A Sport and a Pastime is concerned with this and other things.

The narrator, an American in h...more

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Oct 02, 2012 Bec Thornton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book has so many really beautiful layers, its just almost impossible to describe. The narrator is a sad, nostalgic and regretful unknown man who is never truly revealed to the reader, and continues to compare his loneliness (especially amongst friends) to the imagined love affair of his friend Philip Dean and Dean's lover, Anne-Marie. Although you never get much of a sense of the two characters from the narrator's imagined story, its purely because Dean and Anne-Marie have dissolved into on...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Jeremy rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you like the writing style of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, you will like this book. The prose is so vivid and rich and yet so simply written. It's simply just very beautiful writing. And it's about an American expat in France, so even the subject is similar to those writers.

This book is much more sexual than those other writers, though. I think the timing of it being published corresponded with the rules concerning sexual content being relaxed...so Salter's predecessors couldn't talk about sex...more

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Feb 18, 2009 Rhea rated it 3 of 5 stars

This novel piqued my interested simply because it takes place in 60s France and relays the "carnal story" between an American school dropout and a provincial French girl who drive around the country in a sports car and "get aquainted" with the various hotels along the way. (YES! am I right?)

After about 30 pages of the narrator floundering about and sorting through his life, I started to wonder when the "action" would begin (30 pages is enough time to establish backstory, let's get movin'!), unt...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Lindz rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2012, 20th-century, just-good-writing, north-america

It is a testament to Salter's prose that 'a sport and a pastime' was not a creepy Norman Bates-esque novel. The plot of an older American fantasying and imagining the intimate details of two young lovers in the deep hay stacked heart of France would give that impression that it just might turn that way.

The writing stopped me dead, the last few books I have read were fuelled with a manic energy, action everywhere. But this book with it's short sharp sentences and to the point descriptions, was m...more

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Jun 06, 2013 Steven Pilling rated it 4 of 5 stars

Still not certain what i feel exactly about this book.

Lets start with the positives , the prose is beautiful, Salter can write , he can manage to be economical yet wide screen in his approach, it can make you want to read it to passing strangers. The sex and there is a lot of it is well written (and not all literary fiction can make such claims!)

The thing is after i finished and slept i woke without any real feeling in my chest about the book, it left no imprint except a sense that it reminded...more

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Jan 01, 2013 Lee Razer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics, france

A literary, sexually explicit novel written in 1967 that is about the absence of sex, and love, written from a strongly male point of view.

Our narrator is a man in his thirties, an expatriate living in France, acutely feeling the lack of female affection in his life. He lives alone in a borrowed house. An attempt by his friends to set him up with a woman they think he might hit it off with goes nowhere; he is incapable of making the connection ("It's exciting to be in her company, but I'm always...more A literary, sexually explicit novel written in 1967 that is about the absence of sex, and love, written from a strongly male point of view.

Our narrator is a man in his thirties, an expatriate living in France, acutely feeling the lack of female affection in his life. He lives alone in a borrowed house. An attempt by his friends to set him up with a woman they think he might hit it off with goes nowhere; he is incapable of making the connection ("It's exciting to be in her company, but I'm always a little afraid of what she might say next, and this fear causes me to be helpless.")

A slightly younger American expatriate arrives to stay with him. Dean has a relationship with a young French woman, which sets our narrator off on flights of envying imaginations. He reminds us, "I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that."

And what creations he comes up with:

With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.

Our narrator finds in Dean, thanks to Dean's seemingly effortless success with women, an object of envy and admiration, and his self-professed uncontrollable fantasies about Dean's love life eventually lead to self-hatred.

These long months. It's as if I've been in prison. My ribs show. My flesh is white, so white I'm ashamed to take off my clothes. And with it is a bitterness that soaks in like brine.

It's a devastating off-center portrait of an unhappy man who cannot achieve what he most desires, that intimate loving connection with another human being, told with brilliant not-strictly-linear prose by Salter.

One final passage to remember:

She has been a famous actress. I recognize her. The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.

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Jan 20, 2013 Monique rated it 4 of 5 stars

You can read other people's reviews for a synopsis, so I won't bother.

The prose is indeed beautiful without being flowery or cumbersome. Salter gives his writing a dream-like quality and we find out as the book progresses that the story is actually a retelling by an unnamed narrator of what Philip Dean, the narrator's much younger house guest has told him, mixed with the narrator's own experiences and imaginings. It's up to the reader to determine for him/herself what is real and what is not.

Whe...more

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Nov 08, 2011 knig rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: really-bad-sex

Lets stop beating about the bush here. To be crystal clear: Men CANNOT write about sex. (They probably don’t even understand it). When they do write about sex, it is only other men who might find it remotely plausible, let alone satisfying. Exciting doesn’t even come into it. This is officially the last book I am reading on the subject written by a man.

How bad can it be? Here is a little snippet (from 200 pages worth of similar delectable delights). Our hero, one Phillip Dean, is gallivanting ro...more Lets stop beating about the bush here. To be crystal clear: Men CANNOT write about sex. (They probably don’t even understand it). When they do write about sex, it is only other men who might find it remotely plausible, let alone satisfying. Exciting doesn’t even come into it. This is officially the last book I am reading on the subject written by a man.

How bad can it be? Here is a little snippet (from 200 pages worth of similar delectable delights). Our hero, one Phillip Dean, is gallivanting round the south of France with an eighteen year old French girl, who, as it so happens, has never had any traffic up the old chocolate highway before. Phillip to the rescue then, without further ado (literally):

‘He tries not to press against anything, to go straight in. She is breathing quickly and as he withdraws on the first stroke he can feel her jerking with pleasure. She thrusts herself against him. Dean comes –its like a haemorrhage-and afterwards she clasps him tightly. [...]’Did you like it’, he asks. ‘Beaucoup’.’

Well, what can I say? I’m speechless. No, I’m not actually. When he feels her jerking on the first stroke, obviously that must be pleasure, according to him. What I’d like to do is stick a hot poker up his ass for the first time ever, straight in, just like that, and ask him exactly what he feels when he gives off a little involuntary jerk. He seems to come, if I’m reading it correctly, on exactly the second stroke (doesn’t even abide by the three strikes before you’re out rule), which is probably why she was so profusely thankful. Whilst, in all probability, the haemorrhage was hers and not his.

Now, there are those who are going to say this book isn’t just about sex. Fine, I’ll disregard about 120 pages (out of 200) and go with that for a while. What else do we have here? A young American aimlessly traversing old Europe in hedonistic Abandon? Patricia Highsmith does it so much better in ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’. Even Henry Miller’s Tropic is better. A young American looking for answers to existential angst in France? Harvey Swados does it so much better in ‘Nights in the Gardens of Brooklyn.’ A young American weary of the mortal coil seeking to put salve on his depression by going abroad? Paul Bowles does it so much better in ‘The Sheltering Sky’. In fact, anybody out there writing about a young American questing in parts beyond the seas has probably done it better. If you wrote about it, you would do it better.

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knig Babushka police? I'm mortally mortifiedly aghast. I'm no babushka and I can prove it! (well. as soon as I run my pic through sepia, retouch, B&W,...more
May 31, 2013 01:53pm

Andrew Schirmer First order of business: babushka police--although this is the internet where no one knows you're a dog, I would certainly not group you with those hu...more
May 31, 2013 02:25pm

Nov 06, 2011 Kirby rated it 2 of 5 stars

I read another GoodReads review that made a good point about "liking" A Sport and a Pastime vs. judging its literary merit. The book impressed me in certain ways, but I must say that I didn't really enjoy reading it all that much.

The quality of the prose is lovely. The descriptions have the vivid beauty and detail of an old photograph. The use of an ambiguous narrator is also an interesting device.

Overall, though, the characters didn't engage me. I didn't particularly care where the plot (or lac...more

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Jul 24, 2010 Nick D rated it 1 of 5 stars

Salter's novel, at the distance of so many decades, is clearly well-loved, deemed worthy of a Modern Library edition. One can see why: this novel must in the sixties have seemed like a breath of fresh air, with its Parisian setting, shifting point of view, its elegant, slippery prose, its variety of sexual encounters along the course of an affair. Perhaps it was path-breaking in its day, but at this juncture its lovers seem acrobatic but not well-characterized. And the pacing is rickety -- the n...more

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Apr 17, 2013 Elizabeth rated it 3 of 5 stars

I keep seeing James Salter raved about. When collection of his stories come strongly recommended last year I read it, and while I could see why people would love his writing, I didn’t really like any of the stories, and some I strongly disliked. (In fact, one was a story I remembered reading and not really liking when it first appeared in The New Yorker; I had just forgotten who the author was.) I decided to try again with one of his novels. I’m still not sure I like his work, but I did actually...more I keep seeing James Salter raved about. When collection of his stories come strongly recommended last year I read it, and while I could see why people would love his writing, I didn’t really like any of the stories, and some I strongly disliked. (In fact, one was a story I remembered reading and not really liking when it first appeared in The New Yorker; I had just forgotten who the author was.) I decided to try again with one of his novels. I’m still not sure I like his work, but I did actually find A Sport and A Pastime interesting.

I didn’t much care for any of the characters: the narrator is self-conscious and unreliable (and self-consciously unreliable); Phillip Dean is manipulative and mean; and Anne-Marie is pitiable and strange. And yet I didn’t hate the book. I was drawn into their story, and enjoyed reading it.

Salter uses a storytelling device that I dislike 95% of the time: the narrator of the story is imagining what is happening to the main characters. Most of the time I would prefer the story were just written from the perspective of someone who is one of the actors in the story. In this case I actually understood the use of it in some ways. In part, I didn’t mind because the narrator tells states from the very beginning that nearly everything he’s saying about Annie and Dean is his own invention. (If it’s not revealed until the end that this was all a story told by one of the main characters, I hate it 100% of the time) I actually found myself wishing he would stop reminding the reader, because it felt too self-conscious and just seemed awkward sometimes. I think I also didn’t mind it because it seemed as if there were two stories together: the story of Dean and Annie’s affair woven together with the story of this man who is imagining them. What does his imagination say about him? Why is he projecting these things on to them? So much of the time this storytelling method seems to be a way out of coping with the motives and underlying thoughts of any of the main characters, and while I did sometimes want to know what Annie and Dean were thinking, it was interesting to consider the narrator’s motives as well.

Occasionally the narrator takes the story out of the countryside where he is staying in a friend’s house (and where Dean stays with him), and back to his friends in Paris. The friends are obnoxious characters--wealthy, bored, expats who think they are glamorous and important. The friends have the life that Dean wishes for himself, but it’s still shallow. As I read these chapters I was always eager to return to the rest of the story.

So: I didn’t like the characters, the narrative style, or one of the storylines in the book. And I haven’t even mentioned the casual sexism and racism that may have been Salter’s or may have just been part of the narrator’s character but annoyed me either way. Somehow, in spite of that, I read the book quickly and with interest. It was a good story in spite of itself, and Salter is an amazing writer. The descriptions of places and people seem perfect--not overdone, not full of ridiculous metaphors. And this seems strange to say: but he writes beautiful sentences. There is something about his tone and style that attracts me. I’m just torn with this one between wishing it were a straight-forward story, and being captivated by the idea of what he was trying to do by having the story constructed by someone outside the relationship, so that it tells three stories in one: Annie and Dean’s story, the narrator’s story as he interacts with them and his life in Paris, and the story that is just woven through, his obsession with the young couple, that is there for the reader to interpret.

I’d like to read more of James Salter’s books, and even though I didn’t adore this one, I think it was good to read something he wrote many years ago just before starting on his most recent novel.
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Mar 19, 2013 Natasha Phillips rated it 4 of 5 stars

Although I think this book is often cited as erotica, and probably was viewed that way when it was initially published, what made it a stand-out read for me was not the sex (which is relatively conservative, and more reflective in nature), but the incredibly vivid way in which Salter describes the simple rituals of life. To my mind he's the master of the miniature painting, drawing you in with fine detail which whilst being minimalistic manages to pack a pretty big punch. His ability to draw you...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Lostinanovel rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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About James Salter

James Salter (b. 1925) is a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel (The Hunters, 1957) led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel A Sport and a Pastime (1...more

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Quotes from A Sport and a Pastime

“Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.” — 5 people liked it

“One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.” — 4 people liked it

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