Book #4 in my Great Reading Experiment. (Yes, Watchmen was technically supposed to be #4. But I just haven’t been able to get into it. So I broke the only rules I made for my GRE: once I start a book, I finish it and I don’t start another book until I finish the previous one. Yeesh.)
The Sportswriter (what I’ve come to think of as a tragedy) is by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford. I smell a theme with the books I’ve chosen: I can’t say I loved it, but it wasn’t bad either. Ford writes more to my liking: straight forward. But the main character, Frank Bascombe, is kinda of flighty so there are some passages that go on and on about thinking and dreaming and wanting and…you get the picture.
Frank is a writer for a sports magazine. He does talk about his job, but other than that, his profession has little to do with the story. He’s divorced. His oldest son died of a terrible disease at 9 years old. And, while seemingly okay with it all, he’s completely lost. Frank’s ex-wife, whom he calls X (a fact which is never explained and I never came to understand) is in his life, but only because of their 2 other children. He thinks he’s still in love with her, but I would argue he never was to begin with because he cheated on her profusely. (Not an exaggeration. He offhandedly comments that the number of affairs he had during his marriage was 18 or so BEFORE his wife found out.)
Over the course of one Easter weekend, Frank’s life both unravels and stays exactly the same. It’s the anniversary of his son’s death, he goes on a trip with his girlfriend Vicki (a one-dimensional Texas cliché), he meets the subject of his next magazine story and is completely unnerved when he discovers the aging athlete is bonkers, an acquaintance in his Divorced Men’s club confides in him that he’s had an affair with another man, he meets Vicki’s family and she dumps him at Easter dinner, he’s almost run over in a parking lot while talking on a pay phone (it’s 1985), the acquaintance kills himself and leaves a suicide note to Frank which sends X and the police into a tailspin, and he begins an affair with a barely-legal intern at the magazine.
Frank is a busy guy for being so lost!
I may remember every detail about Frank but I couldn’t care less about him. While he does not come across as pompous, he does come across as clueless. He seems to still be baffled that his wife left him. (She’d found letters from the one woman Frank HADN’T slept with.) He has an easier time identifying with parents than with peers. However, while he loves his young son and daughter, he has no idea how to go about parenting after his oldest son’s death. He seems very tolerant of others (he doesn’t freak when his friend tells him of the affair with another man; he treats the kooky athlete with respect even as he realizes the story has fallen through, etc.). He thinks he’s a “fixer” but he doesn’t want to put in the time or effort (past imagining a satisfactory outcome) to make things work. And he thinks he loves women. But what he really loves is the thought of perfect love…what his notion of it is. More than once, he tells a woman (including X) he could marry her “right now”…that they could be happy together. And, every time, he says (in an aside to the reader), “…and I could be happy.” No, Frank…you can’t.
As the story progresses, Frank doesn’t necessarily fall apart — although I did notice an increase in his profanity at the end of the book…almost as if he was getting more and more wound up and frustrated with the fact that, even though he wasn’t unhappy, he was far from being happy at all.
In the end, Frank literally picks up and moves to another state. Well, he rents his house in New Jersey and goes to Florida. His reason is to find the long-lost daughter of the friend who committed suicide, but he stays even after he finds out she never existed. Distance from everything in his life seems to be the only thing that brings Frank any peace.
I’ve taken a long time to ponder why Ford called this story The Sportswriter. (I finished the book last week.) The only reason I can come up with is Frank really likes writing sports, but doesn’t identify with it more than just the facts and statistics. That feeling of liking something a lot but knowing it doesn’t mean much to you… that it isn’t a part of you…can be powerful. And Frank Bascombe, while successful in some aspects of his world (not his life) will never be more than the words he puts down on a page. And that, to me, is tragic.
