When James Salter‘s A Sport and a Pastime was published in 1967, it was immediately subject to an ongoing debate about pornography (and it does have a series of fairly explicit scenes, even by today’s standards). That did not prevent it from being hailed as a minor classic, and, of course, may indeed have helped to send it on its way towards that status.
The story is pretty simple: the narrator is spending time in a small town in France, an American comes to stay with him, and the American embarks on an affair with a French woman. Salter’s technical skills are immense: the writing is at once expansive and direct, evocative without ever being fanciful.
There are two things of note for me about A Sport and a Pastime. First, the novel–like many contemporary works–is overwhelmingly masculine. The two perspectives that matter are the narrator’s and the American’s; the woman, easily the most described object in the book. only exists as such, without any true agency other than her reactions towards and against the behavior of the American.
Second, and far more interesting, A Sport and a Pastime is far less a novel about romance or France or sex than it is a novel about narrative truth. We are told on several occasions that much of what is recounted is invented, created out of the narrator’s fantasies. Perhaps that is what saves the short novel in the end: instead of a fairly straightforward story of erotic conquest, it becomes a slightly oblique meditation on the nature of desire and its relation to reality.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Convey the nature of characters that are both deeply embedded in a place and foreign to it. Neither the narrator nor the American (obviously) are French, yet the French countryside is its own character in the novel, and while they never belong and never lose touch of their being alien to this world, they also exist and find their way. It’s a delicate balance, and one Salter holds without swinging too far towards either farce or a sense of desolation.