In the basement of my apartment building is a laundry room with a bookshelf. Tenants leave behind old books and you’re free to browse and take what you’d like. There’s a healthy mix of shlock and high-brow; this Brooklyn rental building includes novels by Mary McCarthy, Ben Lerner, and Jarett Kobek. I borrowed Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers from the bookshelf and decided, earlier this year, to give a shot to the weathered paperback copy of The Sportswriter that had been sitting there for some months. I’d long known of Richard Ford but never attempted him. While waiting for the washer to finish its cycle, I opened up the first pages and entered the world of Frank Bascombe, a magazine sportswriter in his late 30s who is mourning the death of his young son. It’s around 1984, and Frank is drifting; he’s separated from his wife, and we find out he had slept with close to two dozen women while he was married. Frank is something of a slacker existentialist, eternally wry and deeply sad, and he has little regard for his profession. At one time, he had been a promising short story writer, but he could never summon the ambition or the verve to stick it out. He briefly, and disastrously, taught at a college. At least he leads an outwardly plush life in the fictional New Jersey suburb of Haddam. He is a creature of hushed cul-de-sacs, fanciful downtowns, and lush, manicured lawns. Frank and Ford share enough similarities—born in the mid-1940s, childhoods in Mississippi, undergraduate degrees from Michigan public universities, health-related discharges from the Marine Corps that saved them from the carnage of Vietnam—that it would be convenient to say that Ford is writing an autobiographical novel. But Frank’s world is too fully-realized for that. This is no autofictive venture, thankfully.
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