A Sport and a Pastime
This summary contains a major spoiler for a novel from 1967.
Some years ago I encountered James Salter in a review of his memoir Burning the Days, which I got from the library and enjoyed immensely. In 2018 I read and enjoyed a collection of his short non-fiction, mostly magazine articles, titled Don’t Save Anything. Next on the list was the novel that made his reputation and which he considered to the best thing he ever wrote, A Sport and a Pastime. It's a brief 200 pages, and I finished most of it on Saturday while getting some work done on my car.
Salter was an American who moved to France to write, and A Sport and a Pastime describes in detail an affair between a rich young Yale dropout and an even younger French woman. The introduction to the book mentions that in this era writers felt more able to vividly describe sex on the page, and there is a lot of that here. Sometimes it is explicit, other times almost clinical, often sensual, rarely romantic. This in of itself would not make the book worth reading, but the unreliable narrator's description of the relationship between Phillip and Anne-Marie recalls a lot of the power and uncertainty of a first relationship.
Personally, I feel that the ending is a bit of a cop out - having promised to return, Phillip returns to America and is killed in a car accident. The book makes clear that their relationship has no future, so I feel it might have been more honest and more challenging to have him simply never return, and to see her cope with that. However, I can certainly see why people responded to the book.
There were two bits in particular that so jumped out from the pages that I felt the need to take a photo of the page so I could transpose them. And here they are:
First, from a description of an aging actress who no longer has much of a career:
She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.
Second, this longer quote about the nature of memory:
Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I will continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can't bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
Any transcription errors are my own.
Some years ago I encountered James Salter in a review of his memoir Burning the Days, which I got from the library and enjoyed immensely. In 2018 I read and enjoyed a collection of his short non-fiction, mostly magazine articles, titled Don’t Save Anything. Next on the list was the novel that made his reputation and which he considered to the best thing he ever wrote, A Sport and a Pastime. It's a brief 200 pages, and I finished most of it on Saturday while getting some work done on my car.
Salter was an American who moved to France to write, and A Sport and a Pastime describes in detail an affair between a rich young Yale dropout and an even younger French woman. The introduction to the book mentions that in this era writers felt more able to vividly describe sex on the page, and there is a lot of that here. Sometimes it is explicit, other times almost clinical, often sensual, rarely romantic. This in of itself would not make the book worth reading, but the unreliable narrator's description of the relationship between Phillip and Anne-Marie recalls a lot of the power and uncertainty of a first relationship.
Personally, I feel that the ending is a bit of a cop out - having promised to return, Phillip returns to America and is killed in a car accident. The book makes clear that their relationship has no future, so I feel it might have been more honest and more challenging to have him simply never return, and to see her cope with that. However, I can certainly see why people responded to the book.
There were two bits in particular that so jumped out from the pages that I felt the need to take a photo of the page so I could transpose them. And here they are:
First, from a description of an aging actress who no longer has much of a career:
She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.
Second, this longer quote about the nature of memory:
Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future. But there is a real significance to the pattern which finally appears, which resists all further change. In fact, there is the danger that if I will continue to try, the whole concert of events will begin to fall apart in my hands like old newspaper, I can't bear to think of that. The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
Any transcription errors are my own.