THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608120166
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. McAVOY
LENGTH: 75 lines
THE SPORTSWRITER
RICHARD FORD
Alfred A. Knopf. 375 pp. $25.
In The Sportswriter, Richard Ford offers a compelling and honest glimpse of life in progress, life without closure and meaning, life that is real. Ford elects to eschew most of the evasive trappings of fictional technique. He adopts a voice that defies the easy answers and feel-good-jargon of self-help psychology. Instead, Ford probes the deeper recesses of experience and emotion. His goal is to discover a truth that might describe what it means to be alive.
That truth is the substance of The Sportswriter, the story of three days in the life of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old writer struggling to understand his life. The novel was first published as a trade paperback in 1986. After Bascombe reappeared in Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award, Alfred A. Knopf decided to reissue The Sportwriter in hardcover.
Born in Biloxi, Miss. and educated at a military school in Gulfport, Frank is alone in the world. He has lost both parents and his oldest son. His wife has divorced him, and his southern sense of mystery is out of place in the ``plain, unprepossessing and unexpectant landscape'' of the New Jersey suburbs where he lives. He is out of touch with his children, his past and himself.
Once a promising fiction writer, Frank discovered after the publication of his first book that he suffered from ``the loss of anticipation - the sweet pain to know whatever's next - a must for any real writer.''
Needing to turn away from literature, he accepts a position as a sportswriter with ``a glossy New York sports magazine you have all heard of.'' With an inexplicable sense of ``dreaminess,'' settles into ``the play of light and dark'' that is life.
But on an Easter weekend in the mid-1970s, he is forced to face the conflicting alternatives that love, death and withdrawal offer for the life not fully lived. In the process, he rediscovers a truth he has always known, that ``life is always going to be a damn nasty and probably baffling business, but somebody has to go on slogging through it.'' Ultimately, he too disovers the need to keep slogging on.
For Ford, the sportswriter plodding persistently through life is the modern Everyman, neither wholly in his body nor wholly in his emotions. He has tripped into complacency. There, mystery means hope remains, so disclosure is to be avoided. But in the hapless, helpless distance between those opposite poles may lie a world of understandings that illuminate what ultimately must be known. Understandings that will ``assuage the life-long ache to anticipate.''
Though Ford's novel often approaches brilliance, it is not without weaknesses. His characters are too conscious of their lack of awareness, too forthright, and too quick to discuss the intricacies of life that most choose to ignore. While this may be useful to the writer in developing fictional characters, it is not the stuff that real life - or effective metaphor - is made of.
Nor are the lengthy passages that comprise the novel's first half. These semi-philosophical meanderings on the meaning of life rob the story of tension and distract from the more subtle truths revealed in Ford's characters.
Frank may be Everyman, but in the end he is simply too passive. What few actions he takes are merely reactions to intolerable situations. Because he risks little, his losses seem trivial. And his Zen-like acceptance of life renders him less sympathetic than is necessary for the novel to be truly engaging.
Despite its weaknesses, however, The Sportswriter, succeeds as an honest exploration of life's mysteries and meanings. It is an introspective search, not for a ``Great Truth'', not for the meaning of ``Life,'' but for a single truth that simply explains what is.
It is a reminder that while ``life will always be without a natural, convincing closure,'' perspective and the ``life-long ache to anticipate'' are suitable closures for stories without end. MEMO: Eugene M. McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk. by CNB