Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | SCD FICTION FOR 13 DISCS | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Perfectly Reasonable Deviation from the Beaten Track
Author Notes
He was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944 & grew up there & in Little Rock, Arkansas. He graduated from Michigan State University & received an M. F. A. in 1970 from the University of California at Irvine. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts & American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature. He was also given the 1994 Rea Award. In 2001 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud prize. He made The New York Times Best Seller List for his title's Canada and Let Me Be Frank with You. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his title, Let Me Be Frank With You.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ralph Bascombe, the brooding antihero here, is not a Walter Matthaustyle, cigar-smoking sportswriter. Rather he resembles John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom (sans cynicism). Bascombe has decided in his ``mid-life crisis'' years to write heartwarming articles for a glossy sports magazine, and in the literal world of sportswriting, he has found a way to avoid life's ``searing regret'' without sacrificing its mysteries. In fact, Ralph is comfortable all around, living an ordinary, invisible existence in the ``muted and adaptable'' landscape of a New Jersey suburb. He has two lovely children, buddies in the Divorced Men's Club and occasional romps in the sack with a buxom nurse. Then comes a crisis, with a narrative that becomes an odyssey through an extraordinary Easter week of death and renewal that brutally challenges Ralph's fragile optimism. This painfully funny addition to Ford's two other masterful novels (A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck establishes the author among the best realist American writers today. (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
In his book The Western Canon , Harold Bloom makes the shrewd observation that when you read a canonical work for the first time, "you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfilment of expectations". Richard Ford's novel The Sportswriter didn't arrive as a stranger, unannounced. The world had been being alerted to its impending arrival, in fact, for at least two years before its eventual appearance in 1986. In the early announcements, it was title-less: "Richard Ford is currently living in Missoula, Montana, and is working on his third book". Then, like the updates on a train running behind time, the information italicised at the foot of his stories became gradually more specific, giving publisher, estimated time of arrival and - crucially, for me - a title. The Sportswriter was a book I knew instinctively I was going to like, especially coming from a writer who at that time - in the early 1980s, when the Raymond Carver-led revival of the short story in America was building a head of steam - was producing some of the most muscular, moving and eagerly anticipated stories around. A month when the US edition of Esquire (the British version had yet to be launched) carried a Ford story such as "Winterkill", "Fireworks" or "Sweethearts" was a great month. "Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of the Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system." This was advice that Carver had been given by his writing teacher John Gardner in California in the 1950s. Richard Ford was born and had grown up in Jackson, close to William Faulkner's birthplace of Oxford, Mississippi, and the Faulknerian influence had been very evident in A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck , Ford's first two novels. But by the time he came to write the stories that would be collected in Rock Springs , he had clearly taken the Hemingway treatment - the great taker-outer versus the great putter- inner - and purged his system. Rock Springs was published in 1987, a year after The Sportswriter had made Ford's name. By then his stories had been shoe-horned (wrongly, it seems now) into the movement that Granta magazine famously dubbed "dirty realism" - reined-in, low-rent stories about people leading ordinary, applauseless lives in tract-home, trailer- park America. They were stories which, by and large, were masculine examples of contemporary fiction, and they didn't appeal to everybody, not even all men. "I couldn't sympathise with [Richard] Ford . . . characters," the American novelist Rick Moody, a student in the 1980s, recently wrote. "I had never punched another man, nor shot a bird from the sky . . . And these narratives by male writers seemed to require complicity with their larger-than-life protagonists." Except it emerged that, all the time he had been working on his "minimalist realist" stories, Ford had been privately writing from another (sprightlier, self-mocking) part of himself. Coming to The Sportswriter fresh from the hard-boiled epiphanies of the shorter fiction was like being side-swiped by a double-decker. It was as different from his earlier work as it is possible for a work by the same author to be. He had left behind the backwoods and lowlife for eastern suburbs and educated professionals, and no one could call The Sportswriter minimalist in any way. It had postmodern flourishes - the narrator's wife is only ever referred to as "X" - and it was slyly knowing and bitterly funny. Best of all, it had a haunting, mysterious quality and no obvious provenance. It was all to do with syntax and diction and the weirdly inflected sentences on the page - "style", in other words. I knew when I first read The Sportswriter that I would probably never stop reading it, and that has proved to be the case. There are passages I could probably recite, if pushed; over 20 years, its cadences have been assimilated into "the sub- literate runs and drumbeats" (Ford again) of how I think and write. "My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter," the novel begins. "Without knowing I had a natural calling I . . . hit on the perfect one: to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter; talk to coaches and equipment managers in the gusty autumn winds . . . to bone up on the relevant stats, then go home or back to the office, sit down at my desk and write about it. What could be better, I thought, and still think?" Then, only a month ago, I opened another book by another writer from the American south and read this: "I am a stock and bond broker . . . Once I dreamed of going into law or medicine or even pure science. I even dreamed of doing something great. But there is much to be said for giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings; selling stocks and bonds; quitting work at five o'clock like everyone else; having a girl and perhaps raising a flock of Marcias and Sandras and Lindas . . . Nor is the brokerage business as uninteresting as you might think. It is not a bad life at all." The Moviegoer by Walker Percy was published in 1961. Binx Bolling, the alienated young narrator, speaks with a voice very like Frank Bascombe's. I could illustrate this with any number of examples. There are coincidences of plotting - the childhood death of a brother in Percy, the death of a young son in Ford; significant journeys to midwestern cities (Chicago, Detroit) with crazy women in tow. And yet I had never seen Ford make any reference to The Moviegoer in print. He is a friend - has been a friend for many years - and yet has never mentioned the book even in passing. I felt a righteous sense of adolescent betrayal. Typing "Sportswriter" and "Percy" into Google brought up a blizzard of reference. The earliest dated back to 1990. In Private Eye, Francis Wheen wrote: "Ford made his name in this country with The Sportswriter , quite a good book ripped off from Walker Percy's brilliant one, The Moviegoer , written 20 [ sic ] years before." So everybody knew! Harold Bloom wrote a whole book about "the anxiety of influence" and the anguish of writerly "contamination". In it, he points out that the preface to Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando begins by expressing a debt to Defoe, Sir Thomas Browne, Sterne, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Macaulay, Emily Bronte, De Quincey and Walter Pater, "to name the first that come to mind". My Googling (why does it always feel like a rummage through somebody's underwear drawer?) produced a quote from Ford in which he acknowledged the "persuasive influence" that John Barth, Joseph Heller and Frederick Exley, in addition to Walker Percy, had had on The Sportswriter . He hadn't read The Moviegoer for 10 years, he said, when he started his own book, and added: "Influence on a writer is a hard business to assess, and I'm not sure I would tell the truth if I could, since real influence means being affected by the weather in another writer's sentences, sometimes so much that you can't even imagine writing except in that weather. And no one who's any good ever wants to write like anyone else." To deny influence, as Bloom has noted, is to "go against both human nature and the nature of imaginative literature. Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism and is founded upon a reading that clears space for the self . . . A poem, play, or novel is necessarily compelled to come into being by way of precursor works . . . The originals are not original, but that Emersonian irony yields to the Emersonian pragmatism that the inventor knows how to borrow." Twenty-five years separate The Moviegoer and The Sportswriter . But the order in which they were written doesn't determine the order in which we read them, and in that way they are discreet and independent inventions, forever free to act upon and "infect" each other. Both are wonderful novels. It's our good luck to have two dogs rather than the single stray, howling at the moon. The Sportswriter by Richard Ford is published by Bloomsbury. To order a copy for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-sportsy15.1 In his book The Western Canon , Harold Bloom makes the shrewd observation that when you read a canonical work for the first time, "you encounter a stranger, an uncanny startlement rather than a fulfilment of expectations". Richard Ford's novel The Sportswriter didn't arrive as a stranger, unannounced. The world had been being alerted to its impending arrival, in fact, for at least two years before its eventual appearance in 1986. In the early announcements, it was title-less: "Richard Ford is currently living in Missoula, Montana, and is working on his third book". Then, like the updates on a train running behind time, the information italicised at the foot of his stories became gradually more specific, giving publisher, estimated time of arrival and - crucially, for me - a title. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy was published in 1961. Binx Bolling, the alienated young narrator, speaks with a voice very like [Frank Bascombe]'s. I could illustrate this with any number of examples. There are coincidences of plotting - the childhood death of a brother in Percy, the death of a young son in Ford; significant journeys to midwestern cities (Chicago, Detroit) with crazy women in tow. And yet I had never seen Ford make any reference to The Moviegoer in print. He is a friend - has been a friend for many years - and yet has never mentioned the book even in passing. I felt a righteous sense of adolescent betrayal. Typing "Sportswriter" and "Percy" into Google brought up a blizzard of reference. The earliest dated back to 1990. In Private Eye, Francis Wheen wrote: "Ford made his name in this country with The Sportswriter , quite a good book ripped off from Walker Percy's brilliant one, The Moviegoer , written 20 [ sic ] years before." So everybody knew! - Gordon Burn.
Kirkus Review
For all its technical virtuosity, Ford's chummy narrative fails to transcend its rather tired genre: the male, mid-life crisis novel. Unavoidably confessional, this back-slapping fictional memoir by the author of A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck boasts of its ""dirty realist"" conceit: ""the only truth that can never be a lie. . .is life itself."" In this case, ""life itself"" (a.k.a. Real Life as opposed to the artifice of sissified fiction) means the extraordinary ordinariness of Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old sportswriter for a magazine much like Sports Illustrated, who's part of a ""modern, divided family."" His ex-wife, ""X,"" lives nearby in suburban New Jersey with their two kids and the shared memory of a ""genetic"" existence. What brings them temporarily together at the novel's outset is the same thing that inspires Frank's uncharacteristically introspective ramble: the birthday of their son Ralph, who died a few years back from Reyes. Until recently, Frank's managed to ""face down regret"" and ""avoid ruin""; once a promising fiction writer, he now prefers to write about a subject for which he holds no special brief. As he tries to explain in his own meandering way, everyone touched lately by his unexemplary life seems bent on destroying the equanimity he finds in suburban anonymity. There's Herb, for instance: the crippled, ex-football player who Frank interviews in hope of an uplifting tale, but who offers instead a bitter story of a sportsman without a sport (i.e., a man without a metaphor for his life). There's also Waiter: the newest member of the Divorced Men's Club, who, by confiding some dark secrets to Frank, transforms male bonding into a kind of male bondage. And then there's Vicki: Frank's latest flame, a sexy young nurse whose taste runs to synthetics, but who refuses to be the pliant bimbo Frank really seems to want. When it comes right down to it, though, it's never very clear in this confused novel what Frank wants, except to convince the reader that ""being a man gets harder all the time."" Ford's singular voice seems squandered on such disposable wisdom and such an insignificant life. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
