Recently in Ford, Richard Category

At around page 45 of this sequel to "The Sportswriter," it suddenly occurred to me that I was reading a book about real estate. You see, the main character, Frank Bascombe, has given up his life as a sportswriter to become a realtor. It's supposed to be an improvement, but I'm not that sure. You can title a book "The Sportswriter," and it has a chance to sell. There's a reason this one isn't called "The Realtor."

But fear not, fans of real estate: this book has all your favorite realty moment, short of someone actually buying a house, of course.

Still, this sequel is as engrossing as the first book, even if at times it seems to be about nothing, Let's just say that this is a slow book told by a narrator obsessed with memories and minutiae. It takes Frank 450 pages to tell us about just four days in his life, and so there's a lot of detail.

For example, on page 195 (just past midnight on day one!), we have a long description of his drive up the New Jersey Turnpike. Frank's far too tired to drive, but he wants to get out of New Jersey and into Connecticut, so he keeps driving. A little boring? Yes, but I don't know if I've ever been able to relate to something in a book quite so much as this. Seriously, everyone on the east coast has probably been in this situation -- just trying to get the hell out of New Jersey and off the stupid turnpike.

Amidst all this, we get this wonderfully boring passage when he considers an alternate route:

Though there is no truly alternate route, only another route, a longer, barely chartable, indefensible fool's route of sailing west to get east: up to 80, where untold cars are all flooding eastward, than west to Hackensack, up 17 past Paramus, onto the Garden State north (again!), though eerily enough there's little traffic; through River Edge and Oradell and Westwood, and two tolls to the New York line, then east to Nyack and the Tappan Zee.

Well, it's not exactly "The Road Not Taken." I was a little surprised I didn't get to read about the drama of fishing for change at the Tappan Zee Bridge toll booth.

At this point, I'm going to include a big spoiler, so you might want to stop reading. As the book went along, I found myself liking Frank less and less. This is a very strange book, in that Frank's son gets hit in the eye with a baseball, and that somehow becomes a life-affirming moment for Frank.

The last 100 pages of the book take place in the 24 hours after this major event, and, because of it, Frank seems to be able to put the pieces of his life together. He figures out that he might want to marry his lady friend. He decides his son is going to live with him. He even rents out a property of his to a tenant. It's all very nice, and he seems much happier -- except that his son is in the hospital after getting hit in the eye with a freakin' baseball and all Frank is writing about is Frank. Luckily, the surgery on the eye goes well, but Frank isn't even there for that.

It's just a little annoying, though maybe that's because I've spent four whole days with the guy, and we need some time apart. I know I bitched and moaned about the first book, and I bitched and moaned about this book too. I just found out that there is a third Frank Bascombe book, and I'll probably end up reading that as well at some point.

After all, there is something slow and methodical that I like about these books. It's almost relaxing to read a book that moves so slowly, even if the main character can be a bit too self-absorbed. 

It took me a long time to read this, because The Sportswriter is a novel of such melancholy. I don't mean that as an insult. I know I often complain about gloomy books, but here I enjoyed the melancholy, if such a thing is possible. This is a novel that can't be fully appreciated with a quick read.

I don't really think of this as a book about sports either. It is more a novel of regret and lost love. It's about learning to pick up the pieces of that lost love.

Still, there's an aspect of sports here that interests me. Ford's narrator, Frank Bascombe, is a sportswriter who writes for a glossy sports magazine. He envies the athletes he covers, primarily because they are content to live within themselves. They know how to live simple existences, while the rest of us are stuck with complex lives.

Athletes ... are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do.... Athletes at the height of powers make literalness into a mystery all its own simply by becoming absorbed in what they're doing.

Essentially, Ford points out that athletes are trained to be and do, while the rest of us spend most of our time fretting about the being and the doing.

I used to mock athletes for giving such bland interviews (okay, I still mock them), but that is really how they think. When Manny Ramirez says he's a good hitter because he "sees the ball," well, he's telling the truth. The rest of us would spend most of our time thinking about trying to see the ball, but Manny just sees it and hits it.

In Bull Durham, Crash Davis advises the young stud pitcher on how to do interviews:

You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends.

That might be good advice, but it's probably more important to be your cliche than to know your cliche. A good athlete always knows how to live within his cliche. The rest of us are mired in complexity.

Like many of us, Bascombe, the narrator, is just the opposite of this. He rehashes every moment of his life. The book is about three days in his life, but it encompasses the regrets of an entire life. There's thinking, and remembering, and analyzing in here -- and I love that -- but there's not a lot of doing. Bascombe tells us about his life, as if it's somebody else's life, as if it's a game story he's writing for his glossy sports weekly.

I suspect that a book called The Athlete would probably not contain 375 pages about three days. It would be much shorter and contain a lot more action and a lot less thinking. And that's not a knock on athletes either. I think I might envy them a little as well.