Sportjournalisten (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 1986; vuoden 1997 painos)

I couldn't finish it. Fine writing in places, yes, but the girlfriend is an old Playboy caricature and the sad "20th C male in decline" business got old for me years ago.

I would think I"m the target audience here, a middle aged American male who's questioning everything. I couldn't really figure out the point of most of this book most of the time. I kept stopping and thinking "what am I reading?" and "what is theis guy rambling about?". It's not totally pointless like "A Heartbreaking Con-Job of Endless Rambling", and I didn't hate it, I just sort of shrugged and said "huh" when I finished it. ( )

Very good writing here. I can sense some Hemingway in his dialogue, but the rest is for sure Richard Ford. Gritty but very smart prose and a wittiness coated in the colloquial dialect of, perhaps, a viewer of sports.

I was a little miffed at the beginning. It's a lot of telling, but it gets real good when things start rolling. And then, even with the telling, it's a solid piece of literature. And it's an odd piece of literature, almost as if the world has something to learn of Frank Bascombe, and that Frank just is. The plot carries on this way until the end. Anyway, if that last doesn't really hit it, Ford has certainly written a unique plot arc with a unique narrator.

Interestingly, I didn't know it, but I accidentally and by chance bought this trilogy on separate occasions to a used bookstore over the course of a year. I hope I will enjoy the rest of them, which span decades in publication dates and bespeaks of lessons learned. Ford probably has something interesting to say if the end of this book is any indication. ( )

Cerebral and self-absorbed Frank Bascombe struggles to fight back against his grief and loneliness following his son’s childhood death and, as a result, his divorce, and his disintegrating life.

An internal story of Frank’s struggle against what he calls dreaminess but is really a detachment and disengagement from the world that is symptomatic of his crippling depression. Told over the Easter week, beginning on the anniversary day of his son’s death, it is a story of one man’s Christ-like agony, entombment, and resurrection.

There is really little story about being a sportswriter, except for Frank’s unsuccessful assignment to interview a paralyzed former football player. That assignment goes South when the shell of what had been an athlete proves mentally shattered, incoherent, yet oddly and uncomfortably philosophical.

In his personal life, Frank tries to reattach and re-engage with reality via an unsuitable “romance” with Vicki Arcenault, a broadly Texan nurse (Frank’s symbolic caregiver) who seems to have no cerebellum at all, but proves to know what’s good for her. And Frank isn’t it.

Frank meets Walter Luckett through the Divorced Men’s Club, who is in a way his alter-ego. Walter’s also divorced, also lonely, but unlike Frank, bereft of coping mechanisms. He seeks Frank out as a best friend he can share moments of deep self-examination. But Frank will have nothing to do with that, preferring not to go deep but rather, to keep his own life on a superficial pleasure-seeking plane. Besides, Frank has his identity as a sportswriter to keep him anchored, while Herb flounders and toys with homosexual sex (even planting an unexpected kiss on Frank) and, in his last desperate gesture, says he’s going to write a novel – the mark of a real writer that Frank attempted once as a youth and has failed at ever since. Instead, Herb writes a suicide note and blows his brains out.

"The Sportswriter" seemed to me to be Anne Tyler’s "The Accidental Tourist," exactly the same subject matter, type of central hero, and exploration, but things happened in the story and it is much more hopeful. To the end, Frank seeks to maintain a nice anonymity but little else.

Precisely this vagueness and amorphousness in the book is what disappoints. While Frank is a well-drawn character, he is not sharply drawn – at times Ford seems self-indulgent, preferring to exercise technical virtuosity at the sacrifice of solid story-telling -- and after one puts the book down, the reader realizes she never knew (or can’t remember) what Frank wants out of life. Perhaps this is intentional and the novel is an exploration of emotional and psychological numbness that can either lead to a coping but always a broken continuation of life, or to the ultimate, perhaps blessed, final numbness of self-destruction.

Still, Ford has written a great novel, a disturbing and bleak one, but a mature and lasting work. It is the first of the Bascombe trilogy, requiring the reader to be patient and to trust that the arc of the novels will clarify Frank as a character ( )

Frank Bascombe claims to be a literalist. But he might better be described as a fabulist, constantly lying to himself and others, inventing life histories for chance acquaintances (which mostly turn out to be far from accurate), and struggling to reassert his personal narrative in the face of his oldest son’s death two years previous, his inconsistent actions since that time, and the end of his marriage. He exists, often, in a dreamlike state, muddled and meandering, often overtly acting at cross-purposes with his best intentions. By contrast, what he admires in the athletes about whom he writes is that they can be within themselves, in the moment, totally fixated upon the task at hand. He aspires to that level of unconcern with his surroundings, his past, and his future. But Frank was never an athlete even in college, and in the end it is his words that must see him through.

It takes some time to get to know Frank, not least because of how poorly he knows himself. He praises mystery—in life, in people, and in circumstance—and says he wants to preserve it, yet he is the consummate explainer, filling in all the details of a person’s life even when, in most cases, he has to invent it. He himself is unclear about what he means by mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the son for whom he is entombed in mourning. Perhaps it has something to do with his persistently spouting proposals of marriage, but never in such a way that they could be taken seriously. He is a man divorced from his wife, from the politics of his time, from his own family history. He seems to be adrift in a sea of suburbs and insubstantial, place-holder, accommodations, that can neither substitute for the absence of community nor inspire hope for the future. His monthly gentlemen’s club for divorced men might easily be a model for all of our modern relations—insincere, uncommitted, grasping after distractions in order to avoid the real issues and emotions that are thundering down upon us. The very distractions in which the sportswriter specializes.

Ford’s writing here is deft and subtle. Frank Bascombe is a man of words, by nature and by profession. But what purpose do his words serve, either when he was a short story writer, or in his career as a sportswriter? He claims that with his sportswriting he is doing about all a man could hope to do in addressing the problems of family, community, nation, even life itself. But he doesn’t really believe it, does he? He is a man hiding from himself, perhaps, and his real fear may be the literal truth he cannot face.

This is no novel to be raced through. It needs to be savoured, maybe even mellowed by age. I’m not sure I would have liked it as much had I read it more than twenty years ago, when it was first published and when I was more than twenty years younger. Reading it today, it felt entirely apt. Certainly, long before the end I had reached the conclusion that Ford is a writer more than worthy of the effort. I would gladly read this novel again. And anything else Richard Ford has going. Highly recommended. ( )