Wendy's review of The Sportswriter
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Sportswriter started out really strong for me - seemed thoughtful and familiar and American, a bit like Stegner's Crossing to Safety.
But after a while, say about 250 pages, I stopped finding the character thoughtful and subtle and started thinging he was kind of a boorish self-serving windbag. It didn't help that I'd rather have spent more time with his ex wife and children, who seemed charming, funny and smart, than his ditzy and unappealing girlfriend or his sadsack friends. I think I also didn't believe him that the New Jersey suburbs were the real stuff of life, as he thought. I found myself wishing that he'd shut the hell up already.
Maybe all of this was sort of the point, but I felt like, well, I knew all that already.
But after a while, say about 250 pages, I stopped finding the character thoughtful and subtle and started thinging he was kind of a boorish self-serving windbag. It didn't help that I'd rather have spent more time with his ex wife and children, who seemed charming, funny and smart, than his ditzy and unappealing girlfriend or his sadsack friends. I think I also didn't believe him that the New Jersey suburbs were the real stuff of life, as he thought. I found myself wishing that he'd shut the hell up already.
Maybe all of this was sort of the point, but I felt like, well, I knew all that already.
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Hey, that's pretty much how I felt about this book too. Ford has revisited the character - is it Frank Bascombe? - in at least one other book, and while I was curious to know what the old misanthrope was up to, I wasn't THAT curious, know what I mean?Actually, now that I think of it, I don't know if it WAS this book I read, or if it was one of the other ones about this guy...
I got a similar emotional feel from a short story Ford had in the New Yorker a year or so ago, so maybe all his stuff has the same tone and blends into itself...
