Something kept me reading this book but I don't really know what. I rarely don't finish a book, but there was nothing here that made me look forward to getting back to it when I had the time to read. There are a few good sections, and there are plenty of philosophical musings, some of them interesting, but often the narrator's thoughts did not tie to what he was experiencing at the time. ( )

Underwhelming. Maybe when it was published, it spoke to people about that time. Although well-written, Ford's protagonist is just not compelling enough to make for a great novel. I guess there's supposed to be something happening to Frank's soul, since it takes place over the Easter weekend, but the events don't seem to support that. I don't think I've ever come across a character so ready with a grin. Since this is the first in a trilogy about this character, I am reluctant to revisit him. The last paragraph or two did resonate with me, but I had to wait 374 pages for that. ( )

I'm really torn with this one. Ford's writing is engaging and really invites you into the narrator's mind, making it an easy book to read and get wrapped up in. But about two-thirds of the way through, I began to find myself getting a bit restless because he seemed to still be establishing the characters. Yes, there are events taking place, but for most, it was not apparent that they were significant or even if they related to where the story was going. Overall, it's a few days in which the narrator manages to move away from his recent divorce and on to whatever's next. Granted, it captures beautifully the way real life leads us from day to day, event to event, without a clear path or plot, but I'm not sure reading about someone else doing that is all that great. When finished, I didn't feel any desire to hear what happened to Frank Bascombe next.

I even followed what I thought was a series of events/characters intended to symbolize an underlying meaning to the story, but, in the end, even that was left at loose ends, not apparent that they were intended to go anywhere or not. Perhaps someone better at hidden plots can do more with what I saw (POSSIBLE SPOILER FOLLOWING) - Easter Sunday is anticipated throughout the narrative, a stormy Friday, a woman wailing from the cemetery on Easter morn, a member of a group of Frank's aquaintances takes a wrong turn, shows up at Frank's place and gives him a kiss, somehow gives the authorities the idea he and Frank might be romantically involved before killing himself; But I lose "Holy Week events" thread here, though Frank does find some kind of re-birth at the end.

Easy and enjoyable to read; just not sure what it was for. Odd.

Os. ( )

Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist turned sportswriter, drifts through his New Jersey days in the aftermath of the death of his son and his ensuing divorce. Yet this is no tale of suburban disenchantment; Frank is an optimist. And this is the feature that makes the sportswriter unique. Rather than lapsing into the tired and conventional pose of suburban cynicism, Richard Ford chooses to show us a man who is happy, or who believes that he is.

Fiction, in the simplistic formulae of creative writing teachers, begins with a character who has a problem. Frank does not appear to have a problem. His son may be dead, his wife may have left them, and he may be afflicted with what he calls "dreaminess," but overall, Frank believes that life is good. The tension in The Sportswriter comes not from external forces that pit the protagonist against the world, but from the unstated internal conflicts of Frank himself.

Frank does have problems, but he's not about to admit it. Why does this man, who appears to be happy with his life, repeatedly find himself parked in the darkened street outside his ex-wife's home? Why is he unable to refer to his wife by name, instead calling her only "X"?

As a narrator, Frank Bascombe is fascinating. This is not an unreliable narrator in the conventional sense, in which we expect that the narrator is not being entirely truthful with us; this is a far more sophisticated unreliable narrator, who appears always to be truthful with the reader, but seems not to be able to tell the truth to himself.

Frank's happiness seems to be entirely superficial. In fact, there's a sense of superficiality to his entire narrative. Frank uses of expressions such as "dreaminess," "literalness," "factuality," and so on without ever explaining what he means by them, but their meaning should become clear in the effect of the narrative as a whole. In short, Frank's world does not seem entirely real. So powerful is the sense of dissociation in Richard Ford's narrative that one reviewer called this novel "uneventful"; this of a novel that, in the space of four days, sees Frank Bascombe lose his girlfriend, get punched in the face, resist the kiss of another man who subsequently commits suicide, and embark on a relationship with a woman half his age. Uneventful?

This is the genius of The Sportswriter. It is all about the narrator and the narrative. There is a reason that this book launched, or relaunched, Richard Ford's writing career: if the only obligation of literature is to be interesting, then this novel, and it's narrator, fulfills everything we could expect of it.

If it were that good, why is it that I cannot remember a single thing about it. My edition is 1995.