James Salter

"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is the intensely carnal story—part shocking reality, part feverish dream —of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen—and pages that burn with a rare intensity.

A Novel

A Sport and a Pastime

Despite spilling vinegar all over it…had to finish it. Hypnotic, constant revelations, but almost nothing commits to memory. Fractured and ambulatory. 

Jeremy Boyd

Colton Ray

The writing was beautiful, but the characters were thin as paper.

A Sport and a Pastime is an astonishing performance, the classic novel from a remarkable writer whose sentences bristle with a singular passion. Salter chronicles a love affair between a young shopgirl and an American college dropout against the backdrop of provincial France. The narrator's cool distillation of events-real or imagined-makes the book both lyrical and tightly, dangerously pitched.

iamazoo

not bad. the writing is elegant, and the plot has some solid points re: youth and intimate relationships, but large swaths of it simply failed to "elevate" above smut for fuc boys (which is...fine? but i'm just too cynical for this kind of story - perhaps it's better suited for a young man in their early 20's).

rebekah kirkman

Andrew John Kinney

A Sport and a Pastime has at least three things going for it from my standpoint: it’s by James Salter, whom I like; it’s set in France which I love; and then of course there is the sex. If there exists a work of literature in English as well regarded as this book is, which has more sex in it, I am not aware of it. Salter’s writing is somewhat like Hemingway’s but without the bluster and self-promotion. Maybe I should have given it a five star rating; I'll think about it over the next week or so.

Salter beautifully describes France, and for me that has a firm claim on my attention; my parents lived in France in the time period in which his book is set, and I have wonderful photos of my mother as a young woman in a market in Montmartre in the 1960’s. My parents were full of happy stories of that part of their lives, and it always seemed a glamorous epic to me. So the time and place have meaning to me; I admit my bias in that regard. His descriptions of the small towns of France could have been written yesterday, as concerns many parts of rural France; I’ve traveled those deserted roads many times over the last twenty years. 

The method of narration is unusual; a slightly older man describing a younger friend’s relationship with a young French woman, and he writes as though he had been present at their most private moments, when clearly he was not. The narrator makes reference to “notes” from Dean, his young friend, but does not elaborate. One is led to speculate that the narrator is in possession of Dean’s diary or something very like a diary. Hard to tell, and in any event, it doesn’t really matter to the story. And as every reviewer before me has noted, Salter spares very few details in describing the young couple’s, ahem, intimate moments. But with few exceptions, the parts about sex are done realistically, and would not be offensive to most people who have lived a little and are not prudish, except that in some situations Dean is exploiting his partner, who on the other hand is a willing accomplice. It's complicated.

Aside from the sex, the relationship between the two of them is described with an almost uncomfortable realism that anyone over the age of 25 can relate to: how conversations falter or drag, and yet at other times both people are happy to be together, while at other times (we only really hear Dean’s side of this) the man is bored with the woman and wants to be elsewhere. As I read this, I kept thinking of a guy I know. Dean is a narcissist, really, who tells himself he will someday marry the girl, but the objective reader thinks, no…...he won’t. The narrator says at one point, to paraphrase, “I’m not selfish enough to love her like that”, but I think one could substitute “use” for “love”. The young woman’s desire to please Dean, to make him love her, is poignant.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Dean; he is described as very good-looking by many characters in the book, so his girlfriend’s attraction to him is completely understandable, and is also enhanced or at least affected by her perception of him as rich. But she wants marriage, and he is, at best, ambivalent on the subject. I’ve known guys like this; I guess most people have. The sex scenes do live up to Salter’s preface in which he calls sex “life’s most incandescent act”. The fact that scenes from this book are still coming into my mind, frequently and unbidden, days after I finished it, say something about it’s power. Salter said he felt the book came to him fully formed, and often he just had to get the words down on paper as fast as they came to him. The muse was, he thought, speaking through him. Maybe so; there is some damned good writing here.

Melody Izard

My selection for March - WOW, and April - 2nd Monday.

-------- see last part for review - although there isn't much to my review.
Early thoughts:

So this is how it is so far. I read to about page 50. Then I said to myself (and saying things to oneself is just what you are so inclined to do while reading this book and absorbing the mood) I'm not sure how I got here or what happened along the way. So I started re-reading. And Ah-ha! That's what he's doing. Just like I had to go forward then backwards than forwards again in reading the book, this "what's his name", dry brittle of a 34 year old narrator is skating backwards and forwards too. He tells this story flipping between "present" and past happenings. Between inside his head and outside observations. Between "truth" and the imagined. And occasionally he reminds us that this all happened in the past - and memory is a pretty silly thing - AND it probably didn't happen to begin with. That's right. He's making the whole damn thing up. Probably.

Sound confusing? It really isn't. It's lovely. And put down that copy of 50 Shades of Gray. You want sex? Lovely descriptions of sex. I think it may have been a banned book or something like that in the 60s. Gorgeous sentences. Wonderful study in point of view. I'm only on page 75. I'm making it last.

Oh and if you are curious about the car Dean is driving. Here it is:
 

If that sucker is not a phallic symbol, then what?

.......

So now I'm finished. And I hate to dissect. In fact I refuse to. I'm not part of this world. Oh, I need money. Hey dad .....? But I am just going to ride around in this beautiful car, through the back roads of France, and have sex. Do I sound flippant? Blasé? Well that's the mood I'm in after putting down this wonderful little book. I want heels and see-through cotton things and soft light and darling little cafes. 

But truly. I'm not really sure why I like it so. But I can't be bothered with that.

A Sport and a Pastime A Novel

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