*Spoiler lie
ahead like statistics in a baseball program.
Read on at your own risk.*
The
Sportswriter is the story of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old, white, newly-divorced,
father of two, living in Haddam, New Jersey.
Frank is not only our subject but also our narrator. In his opening address to the reader, he tells
us “that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the
possibility of terrible, searing regret.
Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.” He continues, “I believe I have done these
two things. Faced down regret. Avoided ruin.
And I am still here to tell about it.”
What follows is the story of his regrets, how he faced them down, and
how he avoided ruin.
While the “present”
of the novel covers the three-day weekend of Easter, Frank looks back at the
scope of his life and gives us scenes from a good deal of his past, and he has
a lot of things, like we all do, to potentially regret. His marriage dissolved after his wife discovered
a pack of letters from a woman who admired Frank, but with whom he did not have
an affair. His oldest son, Ralph, died
of a horrible disease a few years back, before his marriage came to an end. He had a promising future as a fiction
writer, what he calls a “real” writer, but his drive to tell those stories died
out and he switched to sportswriting, which he greatly enjoys. He tried teaching college students for a
spell and had a lengthy affair with a woman there while he was married but about
which his wife knows nothing still. He
has no deep and lasting friends that he can lean on or that can lean on
him. Through the course of the novel,
his relationship with his latest girlfriend, Vicki, comes to an end. Through it all, Frank has a relatively
easy-going attitude that acknowledges mistakes but does not give in to the
emotional weight of regret.
In
recounting the details of his life, Frank creates systems by which he can
understand his reaction to events. He
discusses “dreaminess,” the difference between being a “literalist” and a “factualist,”
the importance of embracing “mystery,” the danger of “empty moments” and the
emotional state of “looking around” your feelings. These are the intellectual signposts that he
has erected to understand and direct his life.
On the one
hand, it’s a really excellent idea for a novel.
On the other hand, I found myself with very little patience for Frank
and his narration. The book from my
reading list that The Sportswriter most reminds me of is Updike’s Rabbit,
Run. Both novels have an ass of a
main character whom it appears that we are supposed to have some fondness or admiration for that just doesn’t make sense to my brain. (For my review of Rabbit run, click here --->http://insearchofsmarts.blogspot.com/2013/12/on-run.html.) And like Rabbit Angstrom, Frank Bascombe is
given multiple novels beyond his debut, which once again suggests that a number
of readers really enjoyed hanging out with Frank. Everyone responds to literature from his or
her own perspective on life, and different viewpoints resonate with different
people who see the world in different ways.
This is not a character or a perspective that spoke to me.
Frank is one
of the most self-involved characters I have read, and not in a charmingly
selfish kind of way. He has enough
sympathy to understand other people, but he really doesn’t give two shits about
them. Until he interviewed Herb
Wallagher for the magazine, I merely found Frank’s posture annoying, that of a
down-to-earth guy without pretensions who is keen at spotting the pretensions
of other people. Herb, the wheelchair-bound athlete
in Michigan, was the first character in the book that I found fascinating, and
he freaked Frank out. Finding something
more complicated than he was prepared for to write a piece that could “pull a
heartstring,” Frank dismisses Herb as “crazy” and flees like that craziness
might be contagious. Then there is the
continual condescension Frank expresses toward the people of the Midwest. Frank puts a lot of stock in regional
stereotypes (in spite of his insistence that he couldn’t be a writer because
too much literature reduced the complicated realities of life into ready-made
stereotypes), and will gladly go on about Midwesterners, Michiganders, New
Englanders, Texans, and on and on. In
fact, he embraces stereotypes of all kind. He anticipates Vicki’s father will be “a gun
store owner type.” When he finds a
picture in Vicki’s bag of what he assumes is her ex-husband, he notes, “I would
recognize him anywhere. Lonesome Pines
was full of such types.” The police in
town are “guinea[s]” and “spaghetti-bender[s].”
In his thoughts about Bosobolo,
his African boarder, Frank lets us know that Bosobolo is “almost certain the
kind to have a long aboriginal penis.”
What?! There is a “kind” for
that?
Bosobolo
brings us to how white, how male, how heterosexual, and how privileged Frank is
without having any idea. The racial,
sex, and gender politics that underpin this novel are cringe-worthy. Except for Bosobolo, race is a relatively
minor aspect of the novel. All the “negro”
characters, as he calls them, are minor or passing, and they all seem to think
Frank is alright. Frank is always keen
to let us know he is alright. The counterpoint to Frank is Walter Luckett,
another recently-divorced white man in town who is going through a hard
time. Walter confides in Frank, much
against Frank’s wishes, that Walter recently had an evening of conversation and
sex with another professional man in the city.
Walter is clearly in crisis over what this means about him and his
life. Frank is cool and patient with
Walter, letting him speak even as Frank is watching the clock and the door to
figure out how quickly he can get out of the conversation. He expresses non-judgment, even as his
thoughts are full of judgment. He plays
the part alright, but we are privy to his real thoughts. In the end, Frank rejects all attempts at
connection and human contact, stating, “I simply found out that you couldn’t
know another person’s life, and might as well not even try.” There it is.
I can only know myself, so why bother to try to know anyone else or let
anyone else try to explain him- or herself to me? Alone and adrift, Walter fails to avoid ruin
and ends his life by shooting himself.
Again, in the wake of Walter's death the reader gets to see that Frank’s sympathies are horrifyingly lacking.
Finally, the
women in the book are all dismissed and condescended to by Frank. While the women possess attitude and
strength, generally, they are never important as individuals to Frank. Frank is more interested, for example, in
befriending Vicki’s father and brother than he is in the lastingness of his
relationship with Vicki, just as he values his lasting relationship with his
ex-wife’s father. And for Frank, the
thing that rights his Easter, after he has lost and been punched by Vicki,
after Walter has shot himself and left a suicide note for Frank, after his ex-wife
has told him that she doesn’t “like him very much at all”—the thing that rights
all this and gives the day a happy ending, is that a cute blonde girl who is
interning at the sports magazine approaches him who wears a “white cotton
blouse concealing a pair of considerable grapefruits.” I shit you not. Frank, twice the girl’s age, flirts with her
and sees that they get along great because they have “plenty to share—her admiration
for me, my advice about her future, my admiration for her, her respect for my
opinion (which may rival even her old man).”
There you have it, Frank’s relationships need. She admires him, he as advice to give her,
she respects his opinions, and she respect his opinions more than what he
assumes must be the most important man in her life. Frank, Frank, Frank. Frank has no idea how limited he is.
The thing
that makes it difficult to take is that it is never clear that Richard Ford has
any awareness either. Frank is instead
presented as a kind of “Everyman,” and judging by his appearance in two more
well-selling novels, it seems others have embraced him.
I suspect that there is an excellent analysis to be made by placing this book in its cultural time and place. Frank says, without irony, that “[b]eing a man gets harder all the time.” He might as well have said that being a white, heterosexual, middle-class, professional man gets harder all the time. America was in a state of change in the mid-80s, as it is today, and a lot of this book feels like a reaction to, and resistance to, that change. If someone writes (or has written) that analysis, please let me know.
This same story told without all the racial, gender, and sexual bullshit could have been a compelling narrative. But as it is, I would have been just as happy not reading it.
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