The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

If Freud was right, and all women really do have penis envy, I'm pretty sure I've been cured of that by modern American literature. Between the Rabbit Angstroms and the Nathan Zuckermans and now the Frank Bascombes, I am eternally thankful that I will never be a middle-aged man.

Based on recommendations from friends, Jacob and I picked Richard Ford's The Sportswriter as our latest book club selection. Ford's hero is Frank Bascombe, a quasi-sportswriter whose home field is suburban New Jersey. Since no one in his right mind chooses to live in suburban New Jersey, that should tell you right away that dude's got issues. But I digress.... Frank's main problems are these: his life has completely fallen apart after the death of his son two years ago; his wife stopped enabling his neverending string of midlife crises (teaching in New England! Relationships with other women! A motorcycle!) and left him, taking their two surviving kids to a different neighborhood; and he doesn't know how to manage his relationships with women. Or with men, for that matter. Frank can't really connect to anybody anymore. A lot of this is his own fault; he tries so hard to see everything from every perspective that he fails to commit to anything, whether it's spending time with his kids, or his new girlfriend, ditzy nurse Vicki. He sees what he could do, he sees what could happen accordingly, and then he reacts by panicking and doing or saying the worst possible thing. That's how he ends up in a quarrel with pretty much everyone he meets on Easter weekend in 1983. Without going back through the book, I'm pretty sure he gets punched more than once.

But Frank does try to have a smooth suburban life. He keeps the house he bought with his wife when they were first married, and he was a newly published author. He takes in a seminary student border. He joins a Divorced Men's Club, a gruesome exercise in male bonding that involves phony fishing trips and torturous conversations over beer. He sees himself as the genial Other figure in everyone's life, so he doesn't have to figure out how to be the central figure in his own--and he sees the homogenous greenness of New Jersey as the way to accomplish that. Same deal with his career. Even though he seems to have little interest in actual sports, he loves the process of ferreting out the feel-good stories, and bringing tidy ideas of literature to the masses of men who read his magazine. In short, he wants to be That Guy Down the Street, the one who can bullshit with you about the Knicks over a beer or two, but doesn't go any deeper than that. He wants to be simple and uncomplex, but he lives so fully within his own head that everything is totally self-conscious.

His relationships with the women in his life are more problematic. He wants his ex (whom he actually calls X) to be more accessible to him, but sort of accepts that she gets to move on without him. He wants his girlfriend, a deceptively sweet belle from Texas, to be the uncomplicated lover--sometimes he thinks they should get married and then can't stand to be in the same room with her, usually in the same minute. And when X and Vicki start looking less likely, he thinks he wants another crack at his previous lovers, even though those relationships ended just as awkwardly. Jacob astutely pointed out that Frank thinks the women are there just for him: appearing in hotel bars, or naked on the bed exactly when he wants them to be. Objectively, he knows that they've got lives too, but he can't really see them branching out after he's been around. By the end of the book, Frank has become unglued because he can't find the female tethers anymore--he's basically adrift in a sea of Boy Issues: post-divorce loneliness, sexual confusion, life situations that can't be fixed with sports metaphors or a quick one-night stand.

Honestly, the whole book left me unsettled--it was one of those books that got darker the more I thought about it. The writing was good, but my desire to shake Frank eventually eclipsed that. It didn't do much for my fear that all guys cheat when they see a more attractive opportunity (which is more my fault than Frank's, but still), or my hope that maybe living in your head isn't so bad. If nothing else, it's a good argument for going out there and making emotional connections, before you find yourself 38 and unable to do it. Oh, and for not moving to New Jersey. That's probably always a bad idea.