The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

Sep 20, 2014 Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Photo of the American novelist - Richard Ford

Part of the Vintage Contemporaries Series, Richard Ford’s 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, is about a divorced 38-year old suburban New Jersey writer who lives out the American dream gone sour. In some ways the story reminded me of Camus’s The Stranger. What I found particularly disturbing about the first-person narrator and main character, Frank Bascombe, was the way Frank would always project motives, backgrounds, ideas and futures onto all the people ...more

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May 05, 2019 Jaline rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019-completed

After spending hours in Frank Bascombe’s head, I am still not sure what to make of him. This book revolves around an Easter weekend in his life, beginning with an annual visit to his son’s grave with his ex-wife (referred to as “X” throughout the novel) early in the morning of Good Friday. Many things happen during that weekend, although the bulk of it centres around Frank’s thoughts.

This is a deeply introspective book. For quite some time I enjoyed the experience of discovering the matches and After spending hours in Frank Bascombe’s head, I am still not sure what to make of him. This book revolves around an Easter weekend in his life, beginning with an annual visit to his son’s grave with his ex-wife (referred to as “X” throughout the novel) early in the morning of Good Friday. Many things happen during that weekend, although the bulk of it centres around Frank’s thoughts.

This is a deeply introspective book. For quite some time I enjoyed the experience of discovering the matches and misses between Frank Bascombe’s thoughts and feelings with my own. I felt an empathy with his character and many of the sad things he had experienced. I felt secure in the knowledge that he had done something of note: he wrote a book of short stories that was picked up by a Producer in Hollywood and gave him and his then-wife a nice start when he was just 24 or 25.

In his ruminations, it is difficult to tell exactly when I began to see some subtle discrepancies in his thought patterns. It is hard to say when this began because for the most part he avoids the first 20 or so years of his life altogether.

When did Frank Bascombe begin to spend most of his life in the passenger seat while life and other people steered and had their foot on the gas pedal? When did he begin to obfuscate many incidents in his life? When did he begin the process of projecting his own thinking and desires onto other people? When did he begin to skip reality and skew it to his own purposes? Now that his 39th birthday is just around the corner, what is it he is seeking and does he have the complete honesty necessary for his contemplations to bear any fruit worth biting into?

Frank Bascombe is a mass of contradictions. He claims to want intimacy, yet he flees from it or sabotages intimate relationships so the other person flees in self-preservation. He wants to be seen as helpful and kind – enraptured by the mysteries of life to the degree that he turns everything into a mystery. Other times, confronted by less ethereal mysteries, the hard and gritty mysteries, he puts his own stamp on them – always slightly off-kilter like a sailboat struggling to right itself on a stormy sea.

At the very end of the novel, Frank Bascombe leaves his New Jersey home to spend time in Florida. He finds family members there from the Bascombe side of his family and that is where we leave him. For now.

While I still don’t know quite what to make of Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford's writing roused my curiosity, and I will read Part Two next month.
...more

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Oct 30, 2015 Glenn Sumi rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: contemp-classics, guardian-1000

I tried reading Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter years ago, but I wasn’t ready. Now that I’ve lived a lot more life, I get it.

Most of all, I get Ford’s Everyman hero, Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old, divorced man with two kids (one has died), who works at a sports magazine after he gave up a promising literary career and lives alone (he’s got an African boarder) in a New Jersey suburb.

I get Frank’s vague yearnings, his dreaminess, his little tragedies, his big ones, his successes, his failures, his ...more

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Dec 08, 2015 Duane rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: rated-books, 5-star-books, american-classics, reviewed-books, 2017-book-challenge, guardian-1000

Frank Bascombe, he is the sportswriter, and he is the first-person narrator of this novel which takes a slanted and sometimes brutal look at the failings of a 20th century American family, especially of the father and husband, Frank himself. We learn early in the story that Frank is not a happy person, and with good reason most of us would agree. He is divorced, but still living in the family's suburban home in New Jersey. He has three children; one of them, a son, has died. And his dreams of ...more

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Nov 01, 2008 Will Byrnes rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Frank Bascombe published a book once. He just never got around to writing another, veering off into the world of sportswriting. The Sportwriter shows us a week in Frank’s life in which he confronts the choices he has made as parts of his life are pared away and we are shown what has already been cut. He is divorced, with one child having died. His girlfriend is clearly inappropriate for him and that ends as well. A sort-of friend comes out and on to him, ending badly. We see his semester as a ...more

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Jul 18, 2011 Lyn rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This takes a long way to get where its going; however the last third of the book is quite good.

Inconsistent and with too frequently one dimensional dialogue, however when it is good, it is very good, reminding the reader of Phillip Roth or John Cheever. Actually, and this is a stretch, this could be a modern, more sympathetic retelling of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and there are some hints to indicate this is where Ford was coming from.

Ford's protagonist Frank Bascombe is an existential ...more

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Feb 02, 2008 Wendy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

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 thinking 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 ...more

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Dec 31, 2011 Lawyer rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Folks who don't mind good writing about a guy you don't like

Recommended to Lawyer by: Group Read On The Southern Literary Trail

Shelves: 2013, marriage, divorce, family, love, on-the-southern-literary-trail, 20th-century, loss, richard-ford, group-read

The Sportswriter: Richard Ford's Bleak View of the American Dream

photo RichardFord_TheSportswriter_zps27b18424.jpg

The Sportswriter, 1st Edition, Vintage, 1986

"My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter.

For the past fourteen years I have lived here at 19 Hoving Road, Haddam, New Jersey, in a large Tudor house bought when a book of short stories I wrote sold to a movie producer for a lot of money, and seemed to set my wife and me and our three children--two of whom were not even born yet--up for a good life.

Just exactly what that good

...more

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Aug 27, 2015 Alex rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019

Did you hear the one about the middle-aged white guy who has a mid-life crisis? You did! You sometimes think you’ve heard nothing else! The world is brimful of middle-aged white guys having midlife crises. Of course it’s full of many other things as well but it's been run, for so long, by middle-aged white guys having midlife crises, writing books about it, putting each others’ books about it on their college curricula, making lists of great novels about white guy midlife crises, sometimes you ...more

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Jul 28, 2009 Kemper rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 100, plain-old-fiction, modern-lit

There was hardly any sports in this book at all. What a rip-off....

Frank Bascombe craves a 'normal' suburban existence the way a junkie craves heroin. Once an up-and-coming writer living with his wife in New York, Frank quit fiction writing and fled to the 'burbs in Jersey when offered a sports writing job for a weekly magazine. Frank's efforts to be a plain old suburbanite with zero introspection of his own life haven't exactly worked out, though. His young son died of a wasting disease and There was hardly any sports in this book at all. What a rip-off....

Frank Bascombe craves a 'normal' suburban existence the way a junkie craves heroin. Once an up-and-coming writer living with his wife in New York, Frank quit fiction writing and fled to the 'burbs in Jersey when offered a sports writing job for a weekly magazine. Frank's efforts to be a plain old suburbanite with zero introspection of his own life haven't exactly worked out, though. His young son died of a wasting disease and his wife left him with his other children when she found evidence that he cheated on her during one of his trips to cover a sporting event.

The book takes place over an Easter weekend that begins with Frank meeting his ex-wife (that he refers to only as X) at their son's grave on the anniversary of his death, and most of the book deals with Frank's inner monologue about the way things should be.

Frank claims to love the solid suburban lifestyle he still clings to even after his divorce and has nothing but thinly veiled contempt for academics and other artsy types, even though he used to be one. He prides himself on being a literalist who deals only with what's in front of him and doesn't waste time on 'dreaminess' like he used too.

Frank is so square that ninety degree angles are jealous of him. His idea of a romantic weekend with his new girlfriend, Vicki, is a few days in Detroit on one of his sports writing assingments, and when a male friend confesses a homosexual encounter, Frank thinks of it as 'monkeyshines'. Frank would probably live inside a Norman Rockwell painting if he could.

However, despite all of his claims of literalism and suburban tranquility, Frank is quietly having a meltdown. He prides himself with dealing with life as it is, but he's disappointed and ill equipped to cope when things go off the rails. For example, he had hoped to write an uplifting story on a former football player paralyzed in an accident about how the player had overcome adversity. When he finds that the man is actually devastated, Frank thinks only of how he can make the guy fit into the story he planned to write, not of how he could honestly tell how the man's life has fallen apart.

Very well-written, but I had a hard time dealing with Frank. Maybe it's because as a male suburbanite looking down the barrel of middle-age myself, I had little patience for Frank's self-deceptions and fairy tales of suburban life being the best place to live to keep one 'normal' and 'happy'. I like my 'burb, but it's just a quiet place to live. As I close in on 40, quiet has become very important to me. Now get off my lawn, you kids!

...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Alex rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I like sports, I like writing, so I figured I'd like The Sportswriter, written by acclaimed author and Pulitzer winner Richard Ford. After about 25 pages I realized that I disliked this book, and I hate-read the rest of the thing because I have a weird inability to give up on a book.

Ford comes from the Richard Russo school of writing, in that he seems to think that inundating the reader with detail will somehow make the book more real, or authentic (I call it that because Russo's Empire Falls I like sports, I like writing, so I figured I'd like The Sportswriter, written by acclaimed author and Pulitzer winner Richard Ford. After about 25 pages I realized that I disliked this book, and I hate-read the rest of the thing because I have a weird inability to give up on a book.

Ford comes from the Richard Russo school of writing, in that he seems to think that inundating the reader with detail will somehow make the book more real, or authentic (I call it that because Russo's Empire Falls was the first book I read that I felt that way about). Case in point: all 375 pages of the novel take place over the course of one weekend. I knew I was in trouble when the opening scene, taking place over the course of maybe twenty minutes, lasted 25 pages. We get backstories and multiple-paragraph descriptions about people and places that never crop up again! Which makes me wonder why the hell I'm reading about them. I suspect Ford was going for some sort of point about the intimacy of suburbia or something, but I was just bored out of my mind. It makes me appreciate all the more writers that only include the essential and trim the fat that serves only to show off the vocabulary of the author.

The second reason I disliked this book was that the main character, Frank Bascombe, suffers from the Thomas Mcguane/Julian Barnes Lack of Sack issue (more specifically, this issue should be attributed to the narrators of Driving on the Rim and Sense of an Ending, respectively). Bascombe, like those characters, is a complete and utter pushover. He wrote a successful short story collection, then moved to the suburbs and became a sportswriter. Fine, that isn't the issue. The issue is the endless descriptions of how dreamy and content Bascombe is with the suburbs. God he loves Jersey, and Michigan, and safety, and wants to kiss and marry everyone, and be polite, and go to church sometimes, and he wants you to know how okay he is with everything. It seemed like no matter what happened, he'd think, golly gee I just need a little pick me up and everything will be a-okay. Part of the reason he quit writing fiction was that he felt that fictional character's issues were unrealistic in their intensity and simplicity, and that real life is much more complex and occurs in shades of gray. And I think Ford was trying to prove that a character, or a fictional world, could also exist in those shades of gray, and still be compelling. Which I agree with in principle, but not when said character is so dreamy and vanilla all the time.

It's not a good sign when your narrator keeps describing all the women he's bedded and you think, "Who would sleep with this chump?" The final nail in the coffin occurred when, in the same day that he (spoiler alert) gets punched in the face by his girlfriend for repeatedly proposing at awkward times, and attempts to make love to his ex-wife on the bed of a friend who JUST COMMITTED SUICIDE, he then seduces a 19 year old intern at his magazine (bear in mind he is a 38 year old divorced father of three). I'm supposed to root for this guy!? ...more

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Aug 04, 2014 Gill rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Beautiful writing. This was like reading an Edward Hopper painting. Loneliness, sadness and beauty.

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Nov 11, 2019 Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzer-fiction, fiction, american-20th-c, novels

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter is the first of his series about the character Frank Boscombe, the second of which, Independence Day won the Pulitzer in 1996. The Sportswriter was written in 1985 and introduces us to a self-proclaimed Babbitt (from the classic Sinclair Lewis novel of 1922) from which it borrows a bit of the style, but is entirely written from the perspective of and in the voice of the protagonist, a 39 year old divorcee with two kids who are alive and one, still very present, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter is the first of his series about the character Frank Boscombe, the second of which, Independence Day won the Pulitzer in 1996. The Sportswriter was written in 1985 and introduces us to a self-proclaimed Babbitt (from the classic Sinclair Lewis novel of 1922) from which it borrows a bit of the style, but is entirely written from the perspective of and in the voice of the protagonist, a 39 year old divorcee with two kids who are alive and one, still very present, dead son. It is set in suburban New Jersey, as Frank finds that Gotham is just too big for him and prefers mediocrity to standing out. He is in an informal club, The Divorced Men's Club, which meets regularly for beers and conversations on anything other than their failed marriages. "In a way, I suppose, you could say all of it were and are lost, and know it, and we simply try to settle into our lostness as comfortably and with as much good manners and little curiosity as we can. " (p. 86) When this taboo about "little curiosity" is broken during the book, things go very wrong as things do later in the book. Yet, there is already a sense of disequiblibrium in all the combined dreaminess of the group: "Dreamy people actually have little to offer one another, tend in fact to neutralize each other's dreaminess in bleary nugatude." (-. 88). This is actually a rather fitting description of gatherings of men that I have been a part of on occasion myself.

The America Ford describes is still in the grips of Reaganomics with the fragile advances of the 60s and 70s starting to unroll a bit. Frank speaks, in a tone I recognize from having been a teenager at that time, in the voice of what could have been my father, about the changes in his own life over a period of roughly 72 hours from the anniversary of his son's death to Easter Sunday during which most of the action in the novel takes place. We learn about his dreaminess which is partially to blame for his destroyed marriage. "Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes caan not even know about except in retrospect when things are fogged." (p. 48) It is this malaise that we live in during the book where he is incapable to talking about - or, indeed, even being in touch with - his feelings and this distance between what he wants to do and what he actually does which is typically a half-effort.

Frank was a promising writer, but decided to become a sportswriter instead allowing him the freedom to travel. "One thing certain is that I had somehow lost my sense of anticipation at age 25. Anticipation is the sweet pain to know whatever's next - a must for any writer. And I had no more interest in what happened next - the next sentence, the next day - than I cared what a rock weighed on Mars." (p. 49) During this period, his oldest son Ralph contracts Reyes disease, for which we still in 2019 do not know the cause, and dies at only 14 - a devastating loss for the family which Frank deals with by delving deeper into his "dreaminess".

At the beginning of the novel, we are at the cemetery close to Frank's house in which his dead son is buried and we meet his ex-wife named X throughout the book. We realize that Frank actually still harbors feelings for her, but his dreaminess prevents him from expressing it in a way that will reach over the gulf between the two of them. Frank then goes with girlfriend and nurse Vicki to Detroit. Before leaving, however, he has a meeting of the Divorced Men's Club after which one member, Walter, who's wife took off to Bimini with her lover, confesses having had a homosexual encounter a few days before and feels a bit guilty about it. Given that this is 1985 and homosexuality is still socially unaccepted, it is understandable that Walter would be stressed out. Frank, of course, is only capable of murmuring some placitudes as he wants to get going and is uncomfortable with the confession.
"What's friendship's realest measure?
I'll tell you. The amount of precious time you'll squander on someone else's calamites and fuckups." (p. 103).

After this encounter, Frank stakes out his ex-wife's house wondering if he should go in and see his kids or not. His son Paul comes out of the house and releases a pigeon named Vassar and then notices his father and comes over to talk to him.
"When's Ole Vassar reporting back?"
"He isn't. I told him he could live in Cape May."
"Why is that?"
"Because Ralph's dead. I think." (p. 116)
I really enjoyed this image and this small conversation about their grief and how they dance around it. It felt quite real.

Frank and Vicki touch down in Detroit. His description of arrival feels familiar to me:
"And what did I feel exactly at this debarking moment?
At least a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce dramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel.
This is, of course, a minor but pernicious lie of literature, that at times like these, after significant or disappointing divulgences, at arrivals or departures of obvious important, when touchdowns are scored, knock-outs recorded, loved one buried, orgasms notches, that at such times we are any of us altogether in an emotion that we are within ourselves and not able to detect other emotions we might also be feeling, or be about to feel, or prefer to feel. (p. 125).
Again, I can definitely relate to this inability to sort through and prioritize my own emotions and take into account their complexity and interactions with the emotions of those around me. I suppose that perhaps both Frank and I lack what is called these days, emotional intelligence, as it was clearly not something I learned at home from a healthy father figure.

In Detroit, Frank is supposed to interview a former NFL player who is paralyzed below the waist due to an accident. This interview goes poorly. As for Vicki and Frank, there is a discomfort between them that starts to grow. Frank insists on saying "I love you", but other than a few tumbles in the sack, "boinking" in Frank's terminology, the distance between them increases. He muses about whether he can say "I love you" to Vicky and tries to touch on his emotional core:
"When you are fully in your emotions, when they are simple and appealing enough to be in, aand the distance is closed between what you feel and what you might also feel, then your instincts can be trusted. It is the difference between a man who quits his job to become a fishing guide on Lake Big Trout, and one who one day as he paddles his canoe into the dock at dusk stops paddling to admire the sunset and realizes how much he wants to be a guide on Lake Big Trout, and another man who has made the same decision stopped paddling at the same time, felt how glad he was, but also thought he could probably also be a guide on Windigo Lake if he decided to, and might also get a better deal on canoes." (p 127). Frank is clearly in the third category there.

There is a falling out between them and he ponders the phrase "What's the matter?":
"...I wonder, in fact, how many times I have said that or something equal to it to a woman passing palely through my life. What're you thinking? What's made you so quiet? You seem suddenly different. What's the matter" Love me is what this means, of course, Or, at least, second best: surrender. Or at the very least, take some time regaling me in why you won't, and maybe by the end you will. (p. 177). Frank clearly cannot truly say "I love you" and feel it sincerely and this precipates the end of this relationship.

They take an earlier flight home to New Jersey, but after Frank drops her off - no kiss - Walter from the Divorced Men's Club is in his living room, having mistaken Frank's African boarder for a butler and had himself let in. He is in a state: "In all likelihood, it is the same suit of casual clothes Walter has worn since his Grinnell days. Only behind his tortoise-shells, his eyes look vanquished, and his slick, bond-salesman's hair could stand a washing. Walter looks, in other words, like private death, though I have a feeling he is here to share some of it with me. (p. 187)

I won't spoil the rest of the story for you. Things accelerate towards the end and there is a curious denouement and epilogue as well.

I enjoyed this book. It is certainly a product of its times, with a vague anti-Semitism and an only half-formed racial conscience as well as an 80s variety of misogyny, but it is a sincere book where the author is probably working through his own emotional quagmire as he describes Frank. I am impatient to read Independence Day to see what happens to Frank Bascomb next. I will also probably delve into a comparison of Frank Boscomb with other middle-American male protagonists such as Philp Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Richard Russo's Donald "Sully" Sullivan because each of them comes from the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-New York area and they all are both similar and different and the subject of books that span a few decades of their lives. ...more

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Jan 07, 2009 Scott Porch rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is the second time I have read this book, having first read it five or six years ago when a book about a divorced sportswriter had a certain currency to me. I have read Ford's recent short story collection, “A Multitude of Sins,” and a number of his other short stories published in The New Yorker.

The Sportswriter, which takes place over an Easter Weekend, represents something of a turning point in writer Frank Bascomb’s life. The story begins with his early morning meeting with his ex-wife This is the second time I have read this book, having first read it five or six years ago when a book about a divorced sportswriter had a certain currency to me. I have read Ford's recent short story collection, “A Multitude of Sins,” and a number of his other short stories published in The New Yorker.

The Sportswriter, which takes place over an Easter Weekend, represents something of a turning point in writer Frank Bascomb’s life. The story begins with his early morning meeting with his ex-wife at the grave of their young son. The quiet, reflective, somber tone that Ford sets during this meeting follows Frank on a trip to Detroit to interview a former athlete, Easter dinner with his girlfriend’s family, a visit to the residence of a not-quite friend who has committed suicide, and a late-night train to New York.

During and between the first-person descriptions of these various set pieces, Frank weaves back and forth through his life. He talks of meeting his ex-wife, his early success with a short story collection, his failed attempts at a novel and his marital dalliances. In his late 30s, Frank is a morally challenged lech that manages to come off sympathetic anyway. And I’m not exactly sure why. He seems to be adrift – with a sluggish pursuit of meaning he never quite seems to find. There are hints, though, at the end that he may be on the right track.

I realize I have told all this because unbeknownst to me, on that Thursday those months ago, I awoke with a feeling, a stirring, that any number of things were going to change and be settled and come to an end soon, and I might have something to tell that would be important and even interesting. And now I am at the point of not knowing the outcome of things once again, a frame of mind that pleases me. I sense that I have faced up to a great empty moment in life but without suffering the usual terrible regret – which is, after all, the way I began to describe this.

It is lyrical and poignant and other flowery things, but I think what Ford succeeds with more than anything else is the authenticity of one man’s experiences told from deep within his own head. The journey was largely depressing – though probably more as a snapshot than a reflection of his life on the whole – but that’s life. No bed of roses but occasionally, remarkably, clear.
...more

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Oct 27, 2011 Labmom rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: award-winners

Awful! Self-absorbed baby boomer muses unitelligibly about life/sports. I didn't understand what the main character was talking about most of the time, the dialoge was terrible and practically incoherent. And EVERY time the main character noticed someone whose ethnicity was other than waspy, he pointed it out: The Polack football player, the Negro cabdriver (Negro? In 1986?) the Irish cop. This was anacronistic and irritating. Maybe you have to be a self-obsessed baby boomer to appreciate this ...more

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Mar 11, 2012 Anne Kadet rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Like reading a piece of poop.

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Oct 08, 2019 Jamie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

There are some books that just connect with readers in their own time, in a particular frame of mind, at a certain juncture of life. These books aren't something for everyone, they're everything for someone.

Olive Kitteridge comes to mind. Some people found that book boring. While for others it hits a certain note and they are captivated and deeply moved, almost haunted.

That's how The Sportswriter was for me. The right book at the right time. I absolutely loved it.

On a trivial note, I recently ...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Paul rated it did not like it · review of another edition

It took me almost a month to finish Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter." I couldn't stand reading more than 5-10 pages at a time. Why? Well, I'd say that reading "The Sportswriter" is like being at a cocktail party, stuck listening to a bore whom you ordinarily avoid. But that analogy is generic enough for Ford to appreciate it, so I'll attempt the intensity he appears to loathe: reading "The Sportswriter" is like being stuck in a urologist's waiting room with a logorrheic -- boredom and It took me almost a month to finish Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter." I couldn't stand reading more than 5-10 pages at a time. Why? Well, I'd say that reading "The Sportswriter" is like being at a cocktail party, stuck listening to a bore whom you ordinarily avoid. But that analogy is generic enough for Ford to appreciate it, so I'll attempt the intensity he appears to loathe: reading "The Sportswriter" is like being stuck in a urologist's waiting room with a logorrheic -- boredom and irritation while anticipating nothing but pain.

It's not surprising that one of this novel's biggest fans is Walker Percy, since in "The Moviegoer" (suspiciously similar title) Percy created the same kind of protagonist who inhabits (but does not live in) the pages of "The Sportswriter" - the impulsive dullard. Frank Bascombe, the eponymous Sportswriter, spends 350 pages doing stupid things like stalking his ex-wife, proposing to a girlfriend whom he doesn't like very much, and jumping random trains to New York, with no forethought or afterthought. This would be tolerable if the stream of consciousness that constitutes the narrative portrayed Bascombe as recognizably disturbed or even human, but it doesn't -- the man seems to think in platitudes and offers some trite lesson on every other page (" . . . is the best that any of us can hope for"). Similarly unhelpful is Ford's predictable prose style. The length and rhythm of his sentences almost never vary, they're mostly two-clause, semi-complex sentences that cluster into mid-length paragraphs of no particular point or direction. Is Ford trying to portray anomie, or is he just a lousy writer? There's reason to believe that he's making a conscious attempt to portray a man who is detached from his own emotions, since Bascombe divorced his wife after the death of their oldest son. There's also reason to believe that Ford is just a very limited writer, since on the night Bascombe's wife discovers his infidelities, she sets fire to her . . . oh, Jesus . . . hope chest. It would be sledgehammer symbolism if Ford could summon enough energy to wield a sledgehammer. There is also Bascombe's curiously dated, borderline racist language. I don't remember much unironic use of the word "negro" in the 1980s, but it's how Bascombe describes every black character. Is Ford depicting an anachronistic way of thinking, or is he just a tin-eared jerk? I'm too willing to believe the latter, since his characters don't speak like normal human beings, they speak like overly self-aware literary cliches ("you're an awful man, Frank! You weren't awful when we were married, but you've gotten much worse").

"The Sportswriter" proves, through negative example, the maxim that novelists should avoid the word "all," since Ford uses it in, well, all the worst ways, including lazy descriptions ("like all hometown suburbs") and obnoxious generalizations ("all writers want this"). Regarding the latter, Bascombe, and by extension Ford, jumps to conclusions about every single person he sees, reducing them to two-dimensional sketches ("she's named either Jan or Kate and reads Roosevelt biographies") with no interiority whatsoever. These presumptions are studded with assumptions about social status and geographic origin that are supposed to be economical storytelling but are just lazy crutches. Plus, I'm predisposed to hate books in which the protagonist is an ex-fratboy who seems familiar every other male character's former Greek status. I mean, who the f--k cares? I sure as hell didn't. Damn, I hated this book. ...more

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Mar 01, 2014 Laura rated it it was ok · review of another edition

After reading "Canada" and "The Sportswriter", I have come to the conclusion that I just don't care for Richard Ford's writing. I found both of the books dull, slow, and remarkably shallow considering the narrators spend most of their time intently navel-gazing. Maybe it's a guy thing that I'm just not getting, but I found none of Frank Bascombe's introspective musings to be revelatory, illuminating, or at all interesting.

Ford used repetition in both the books I read but not to any advantage. After reading "Canada" and "The Sportswriter", I have come to the conclusion that I just don't care for Richard Ford's writing. I found both of the books dull, slow, and remarkably shallow considering the narrators spend most of their time intently navel-gazing. Maybe it's a guy thing that I'm just not getting, but I found none of Frank Bascombe's introspective musings to be revelatory, illuminating, or at all interesting.

Ford used repetition in both the books I read but not to any advantage. In "Canada" the the mother is described over and over again. In "The Sportswriter" we get "dreamy" and "mysterious thrown at us ad nauseum. Ford tries to convince us that Frank is somehow dreamy; however, this reader didn't buy it. Frank seems to be an arrogant, slightly misogynistic, possibly racist, self-centered man. Both words were so overused that I was ready to pull my hair out. The way the words Negro and colored were used also hit me as artificial and contrived. From what I could figure out, the book seems to take place sometime in the early '80s, Bascombe is relatively young, college educated, and living on the east coast. Hardly the kind of man to be throwing around Negro and colored in the '80's. I suspect it was to show that Bascombe has racist tendencies (he also used polack and other derisive references to those of eastern European descent in addition to referring as Muslim as a race not a religion) but it felt forced and awkward. One other linguistic problem caught my eye. Frank makes a lot of assumptions about where certain types of people live, in one instance he mentions that a house looks like one that a "tool& dye" manufacturer might live in. Okay, it could be a type that got missed but since one of the big hooks of the book is pigeonholing the blue-collar workers and athletes, one might hope he would make sure it was "tool & die." Okay, that was maybe a little nit-picky.

In the end, if I want to read about a kind of creepy, misogynistic guy who spends a lot of time thinking about himself, I'll stick to Rabbit Angstrom. If I want suburban angst, I'll turn to Yates or Cheever. ...more

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Feb 11, 2013 Ben Hourigan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I've been raving about this book for months, chiefly on the basis of its opening chapters, which for me were an unprecedented exposition in art (and such beautiful art, at that) of the value of the ordinary, uncelebrated life. It's something I am often deep need of being reminded of, so often do I feel myself a failure, and curiously enough, it's one of the things I hope to remind others of later in my writing career. Maybe not just now—my first two books deal with the issues of one who ...more

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Apr 06, 2015 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, america

The writing style will not be to everyone's taste but it's a deep and thoughtful book tinged with a hint of melancholia.It does drag at times but i stuck with it and was richly rewarded.As the book only spans a few days there is a lot of thinking back to the past during moments in the present which works very well.I think if you are thirtysomething and pondering about life you will relate to this book.

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Sep 16, 2012 Max rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century

Hi, I’m Frank Bascombe entering middle age in a dreamy self-absorbed lethargic marking of the time between birth and death. My wife divorced me after she became disillusioned with me and I turned to other women to reaffirm my value. This change in our relationship and resulting divorce was precipitated by the death of our nine year old son, but I have always avoided any challenge and sought mediocrity. Many years ago I started out to be a novelist but it required a lot of thought so I settled ...more

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Jun 24, 2007 Gerry rated it really liked it

There’s a scene in the first chapter of The Sportswriter that lays bare the novel’s heart. Frank Bascombe and his ex-wife—referred to as X throughout—arrive home from a night out to find their house ransacked. In making a list of the missing items for the police, X finds letters from another woman and demands to know who she is. Frank remains silent, and X, releasing the trapped fury created by the death of her son, her deteriorating marriage, and now the apparent infidelity of her husband, There’s a scene in the first chapter of The Sportswriter that lays bare the novel’s heart. Frank Bascombe and his ex-wife—referred to as X throughout—arrive home from a night out to find their house ransacked. In making a list of the missing items for the police, X finds letters from another woman and demands to know who she is. Frank remains silent, and X, releasing the trapped fury created by the death of her son, her deteriorating marriage, and now the apparent infidelity of her husband, tears apart her hope chest and burns it in the fireplace.

“The burglars had left Polaroid pictures of the inside of our empty house scattered about for us to find when we got back from seeing The Thirty-Nine Steps at the Playhouse, plus the words, 'We are the stuffed men,' spray-painted onto the dining room wall. Ralph had been dead two years. The children were with their grandfather at the Huron Mountain Club, and I was just back from my teaching position at Berkshire College, and was hanging around the house more or less dumb as a cashew, but otherwise in pretty good spirits. X found the letters in a drawer of my office desk while looking for a sock full of silver dollars my mother had left me, and sat on the floor and read them, then handed them to me when I came in with a list of missing cameras, radios and fishing equipment. She asked if I had anything to say, and when I didn't, she went into the bedroom and began tearing apart her hope chest with a claw hammer and a crowbar. She tore it to bits, then took it to the fireplace and burned it while I stood outside in the yard mooning at Cassiopeia and Gemini and feeling invulnerable because of dreaminess and an odd amusement I felt almost everything in my life could be subject to. It might seem that I was within myself then. But in fact I was light years away from everything.”

The Sportswriter begins on Good Friday with Frank and X paying a graveside visit to their son Ralph and ends late Easter Sunday with Frank hitting on a college girl in his Manhattan office. The novel is the kind where not much happens, but everything that does rings of failure. There’s X burning her hope chest; Frank’s aborted interview with a paraplegic former footballer who believes he’s still on the team; Frank’s Easter day visit to his girlfriend’s parents’ house, where the father has assembled an entire car in the basement; the post office losing the only copy of Frank’s first novel. Then there’s Easter itself, a day in the real world where miracles never happen, no one rises from the dead, and sins remain unforgiven. Characters bump and jangle him, but Frank drifts on a lazy current he’s created, unaware of its source. It’s a careful look at a shell-shocked man who can fill hundreds of pages with insightful descriptions but never knows what to say to those who need him to say something, anything that will demonstrate his awareness of them.

Among its greatest virtues is its examination of the alien world of male friendship, one in which not even the natives fully understand the customs. Through The Divorced Men's Club, men linked by their inability to maintain close relationships, Frank meets Walter Luckett. Walter confides in Frank, hoping his confession will uncover a like mind. "He would like me to ask him a good telling question, something that will then let him tell me a lot of things I don't want to know," Frank says. "But if I have agreed to listen, I have also agreed not to ask. This is the only badge of true friendship I'm sure of: not to be curious."

Later, Frank is at the police station because of his tangential relationship to a crime. Speaking of the sergeant, Frank says, "He extends both his legs and crosses them at the ankles. It is his way of inviting conversation between menfolk, though I'm stumped for what to say. It's possible he would understand if I said nothing." And nothing is exactly what Frank is looking for in a friend. ...more

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Apr 29, 2012 CC rated it did not like it · review of another edition

About ten years ago I read the second book in this triglogy -- Independence Day, for which writer Richard Ford won a Pulitzer, and found his writing quite nice. Reminded of that, I picked this up, the first book in that trilogy. Either Ford's writing changed a great deal from one book to the other, or my tastes have changed, not sure which. But this wasn't the type of writing I remembered.

The book follows Frank Bascombe over an Easter weekend as he drifts around in his own mind, recalling the About ten years ago I read the second book in this triglogy -- Independence Day, for which writer Richard Ford won a Pulitzer, and found his writing quite nice. Reminded of that, I picked this up, the first book in that trilogy. Either Ford's writing changed a great deal from one book to the other, or my tastes have changed, not sure which. But this wasn't the type of writing I remembered.

The book follows Frank Bascombe over an Easter weekend as he drifts around in his own mind, recalling the death of his son a few years prior and his recent divorce, with a woman only known as X. Years earlier he had a collection of stories published, but abruptly quit writing early on to become a sportswriter -- a lot was made of this, it being brought up repeatedly, as I guess he regrets it. For the entire novel he's got no energy, no gumption, no verve. He's got a new girlfriend, and maybe he'll marry her. He meets her parents. That's about as exciting as it gets. Not too much else happens in the way of plot. Maybe that was the point -- life's filled with regret and either shake it off or don't? I haven't a clue, really. So much of it ran together that I simply stopped caring.

I suppose Frank was having an early mid-life crisis, except he was so damn boring I couldn't help but to think it was all of his own making. If you want a life, you should probably, I don't know, act like you do and get involved -- care -- rather than expect everyone to comfort your ass and physically breathe life into you every second of the day. There really wasn't anything but his own wobbly introspective thoughts going on page after page. I'll pass.

By the way, what person in 1986 uses the word Negro? I mean -- what??!! The main character said it five or six times to describe different characters: The Negro boy, the Negro janitor... The book takes place in the (then) present day 1986 New Jersey, not in the 1960's south. I kept wishing the main character would say that to one of their faces so I could witness him being punched in the mouth. But I didn't get the pleasure. ...more

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Oct 11, 2012 Stephen Burns added it · review of another edition

Another book I couldn't finish. Sigh. This is about as dry as it gets, and the first half of the book is spent inside Bascombe's head. 200 pages of introspection just doesn't do it for me.

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Mar 14, 2009 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The first striking element of this novel is Ford’s use of present tense throughout. Indeed, it is impressive a 375 page novel be rendered in first person and only covers 3 days’ worth of events. Bascombe’s floating narration, however, is the charm in this novel. He editorializes everything that happens over the weekend to psychoanalytical depths, without once admitting that he himself is profoundly depressed. Dreaminess is used in lieu of depression, and Ford renders this condition superbly The first striking element of this novel is Ford’s use of present tense throughout. Indeed, it is impressive a 375 page novel be rendered in first person and only covers 3 days’ worth of events. Bascombe’s floating narration, however, is the charm in this novel. He editorializes everything that happens over the weekend to psychoanalytical depths, without once admitting that he himself is profoundly depressed. Dreaminess is used in lieu of depression, and Ford renders this condition superbly believable.
Frank is mostly absent from everything that occurs in this novel. He withdraws into himself and tends only to interact with characters using the impetus of what is unspoken or undone. He believes he is direct and honest with people when he is, in fact, elusive and dishonest with himself. He seems to long for profound connections in the wake of his son’s death and separation from his wife (spoken of only as “X”).
He self medicates with women. Eighty percent of the novel concerns his relationship with women, whether it be his ex-wife, his current girlfriend, Vicki, or the handful of past relationships he’s had. In the final 15 pages of the book, Frank seems to bounce back from his relationship with Vicki, and he begins a new relationship with a woman twice his age (although, in the last section entitled “The End” when the reader is pushed ahead with Frank a few months after Easter weekend has ended, he is skeptical about their relationship having any lasting prospect).
His relationship with men are abysmal, as he keeps them at arms length, even as tries to convince himself that all he needs is some good male bonding (he fantasizes about fishing with Vicki’s father and brother; the divorced men’s club he’s in provides little in the way for comfort, and though he admits his lukewarm feelings for the institution, he somehow thinks it’s good for him and that he needs it). The only (arguably) real relationship he has with another man is Walter, a pushy and depressed member of the divorced men’s club who more or less forces his friendship onto Frank and ends up killing himself.
The most impressive aspect of this novel is the way that Ford is able to write a thoroughly convincing and sympathetic narrator, whom I trust completely, while at the same time cannot admit, or somehow cannot realize, that not only is he depressed, but he’s more or less okay with it. A paradox of reliability.
I enjoyed his long winded musings; Frank Bascombe’s way of thinking is thoroughly unique while being as ordinary as home, sometimes spot on in regards to such elusive qualities of feelings like whiffs of something familiar but unexplainable.

...more

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Feb 22, 2009 Dan rated it really liked it

Shelves: literature, read-in-2009

This was a lonely book about a lonely man who does and says things that you disagree with. Sadly many of these things you have either contemplated saying (or doing) or have already done yourself. In contrast, Ford makes Bascombe into a caring and intuitive character who catches himself from saying something to spare a persons feelings only to ruin it by asking them to hop into bed moments later. Frank Basombe is one of the truest human beings i have found in literature.

The book mostly takes ...more

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Dec 13, 2008 Jacob rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Reminiscent of Updike's Rabbit series, The Sportswriter is the typical "midlife crisis" novel. I am sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy this book, but I am not one of them. (I also did not like "Rabbit Run", the only one of those I got through.) While many of the characters in this novel are interesting, I never felt I got deeper than a surface glimpse of any of them. They are mostly miserable. And ordinary. And miserably ordinary, with ordinary lives and ordinary failings. Like many ...more

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Sep 10, 2016 William2 rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20-ce, fiction, us

Adored this when I read it 30 years ago. I wonder if it would stand up to a second reading?

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Jun 29, 2011 Kim Fay rated it liked it · review of another edition

This book is infused with a hypnotic suburban melancholy that kept me reading even when I was completely frustrated with the author. His writing is superb, but sometimes I wanted him to let the story go. Instead, I often felt that I was reading an essay about the characters, or suburbia, or writing or the modern human condition. Good essays, but essays, nonetheless. "The Sportswriter" is very much of its time (the mid-1980s), both in its style and in its self-reflection that verges on ...more

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