a book
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford · 1986 · 375 pages
At dawn on Good Friday every year, Frank Bascombe and his wife meet to pay their respects at the grave of their firstborn. This year Frank plans to spend the Easter weekend with a new girlfriend while on assignment for his magazine. What might have been an idyllic adventure becomes a succession of calamities that extinguish almost all the carefully nourished equilibrium of a man grappling with the failure of love and the death of his son. The end and the aftermath of a marriage, the emotional dislocation and the discovery of a new life while in the embrace of troubled memories of the old have seldom been more harrowingly plotted. The Sportswriter is also a wistful, very funny and always human illumination of domestic and sexual anguish through the story of Frank Bascombe, its hero, the sportswriter.
recommended by 5 people
sourced from public statements
Philip Seymour Hoffman
“These two novels are about Frank Bascombe, a middle-aged man living in New Jersey. The Sportswriter begins a few years after the death of one of his children, and by the end of Independence Day, you’ve followed him for the next eight or so years. These are two of the greatest books about grief. Bascombe doesn’t sit in a corner and weep, but you know that his life has been affected by that loss. He used to be married; he used to have a family. It’s also incredibly accurate and illuminating about how men think. At the end of the first book, Bascombe wonders if one effect of life is to cover you in a residue “of all the things you’ve done and been and said and erred at.” In that instant, the veil lifts, and he feels a sense of being free again. But he also realizes that this lightness won’t last. And, worse, that it might not come again.”↗
Owen Wilson
“I like the part where he runs into this guy, Walter Luckett, at a bar. He talks about the other times he’s run into him. And he says, There’s one time when he sat down, and after we exchanged a few things, it went into this horrible silence of us just staring at each other – it went on for five minutes or so until he got up and left without saying a word.”↗
Cillian Murphy
“Along with Updike, Ford has of course been the great chronicler of the modern American male. I relished the Bascombe Trilogy, beginning with The Sportswriter. Frank Bascombe worked his way under my skin.”↗
Chris Wesseling
“Some favorite sports books: The Game, Dryden The Summer Game, Angell The Breaks of the Game, Halberstam Wait Till Next Year, William Goldman Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand A Fan’s Notes, Exley The Sportswriter, Richard Ford Fever Pitch, Hornby Ball Four, Bouton Cheers 🍻”↗
