Scan barcode
A review by kinbote4zembla
A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
4.0
Let's just get this out of the way: James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is essentially just The Great Gatsby with an added hot and sticky coating of eroticism. Both revolve around three people, two doomed lovers and a distant narrator who either envies or loves the mysterious man at the centre of the romance. Both feature decadence. Both end tragically with death.
But Salter's slick patina of cumshots and moist cunts ensures that any resemblance to Gatsby is forgivable. It's like when someone remade Forrest Gump as Foreskin Gump or Everybody Loves Raymond as Everybody Does Raymond. Those are not rip-offs. That shit is inspired.
Okay. Well, maybe that's a little much. My point is simply that if you're approaching this novel hoping to find something unique in its plot, you'll be very disappointed. But I really don't think Salter was trying to find the next milk.
He is telling a traditional story. And his success is in the telling. In fact, I would argue that the archetypal nature of the story is meaningful.
There are two (or more) fictions occurring simultaneously in this book. The first is Salter's, the overall novel. The second is the narrator's. He is a man in his thirties (?), definitely approaching middle-age, with thinning hair and lines forming on his face. In sumptuous prose, his exploits in Autun, "the real France," are detailed. And key to this is his longing, for everything, for everyone. He fantasizes about a woman he may have met once or twice. He can imagine his entire life with her. And this is essentially his angle when he meets young Yale dropout, Phillip Dean. About twenty, thirty pages into the novel, there is a significant shift. Dean becomes the focus of the narrator's writing. Then, the book finds its signature thrust, that of Dean's romance with the young local girl, Anne-Marie.
The narrator acknowledges that some (if not all) of the romance is a fantasy in his own head, putting pieces of information together. This is the book's most interesting aspect. Did anything happen, at all? Should we care if it is just a fantasy?
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much of the narrative is objectively true in the novel's world. We are left with a very lonely portrait of an unfulfilled man. And that's a great layer. This isn't really a book about young love. It's about disappointment and regret and jealousy and displacement. It's sort of a con, in that way, just like Phillip Dean. You're offered romance but you get heartache. And the typical tragic romance emphasizes the narrator's longing. All he wants is that cliché.
Unfortunately, Salter can't sustain his erratic characters. He blows his load, early. I loved so much of what was going on and then suddenly the novel was struck by inertia. Nothing happens, nothing is considered. It's just more sex and then a strange narrative turn and an abrupt end.
Oh, well. C'est la vie.
4 Tubes of Vaseline for All the Sodomy out of 5
But Salter's slick patina of cumshots and moist cunts ensures that any resemblance to Gatsby is forgivable. It's like when someone remade Forrest Gump as Foreskin Gump or Everybody Loves Raymond as Everybody Does Raymond. Those are not rip-offs. That shit is inspired.
Okay. Well, maybe that's a little much. My point is simply that if you're approaching this novel hoping to find something unique in its plot, you'll be very disappointed. But I really don't think Salter was trying to find the next milk.
He is telling a traditional story. And his success is in the telling. In fact, I would argue that the archetypal nature of the story is meaningful.
There are two (or more) fictions occurring simultaneously in this book. The first is Salter's, the overall novel. The second is the narrator's. He is a man in his thirties (?), definitely approaching middle-age, with thinning hair and lines forming on his face. In sumptuous prose, his exploits in Autun, "the real France," are detailed. And key to this is his longing, for everything, for everyone. He fantasizes about a woman he may have met once or twice. He can imagine his entire life with her. And this is essentially his angle when he meets young Yale dropout, Phillip Dean. About twenty, thirty pages into the novel, there is a significant shift. Dean becomes the focus of the narrator's writing. Then, the book finds its signature thrust, that of Dean's romance with the young local girl, Anne-Marie.
The narrator acknowledges that some (if not all) of the romance is a fantasy in his own head, putting pieces of information together. This is the book's most interesting aspect. Did anything happen, at all? Should we care if it is just a fantasy?
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how much of the narrative is objectively true in the novel's world. We are left with a very lonely portrait of an unfulfilled man. And that's a great layer. This isn't really a book about young love. It's about disappointment and regret and jealousy and displacement. It's sort of a con, in that way, just like Phillip Dean. You're offered romance but you get heartache. And the typical tragic romance emphasizes the narrator's longing. All he wants is that cliché.
Unfortunately, Salter can't sustain his erratic characters. He blows his load, early. I loved so much of what was going on and then suddenly the novel was struck by inertia. Nothing happens, nothing is considered. It's just more sex and then a strange narrative turn and an abrupt end.
Oh, well. C'est la vie.
4 Tubes of Vaseline for All the Sodomy out of 5