The Sportswriter by Richard Ford is an engaging, complicated, and troubling novel. I read it ambivalently, navigating a strange landmine field each page. The good: it's about a suburban divorcee in a post-Cheever Northeast muddling through a midlife crisis, all in the course of one sad weekend. I love existential crap like that. The themes were poignant; the longing was real. The best part was the dialogue. Ford has a real knack for realistic conversations that turn on unexpected revelations. There were a handful of discussions in this book that were truly shocking, and I enjoyed every thoughtful encounter. None of the dialogue was expected, and I found myself loving each conversation as they unfolded, knowing that I would learn something meaningful about the narrator and his companions.
The bad: I have trouble calling a book racist. A lot of great literature has problematic racial perspectives. The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, some Flannery O'Connor . . . many works I think are great are saddled with racist descriptions that I have to condemn for my students. My own belief is that we all have subconscious racial bias--some more than others--and that we are all guilty of problematic racial perspectives at times. That said, it isn't helpful to judge literature morally, especially if the aim of the text transcends the author's blind spots. I instruct my students to identify racism; we acknowledge the shortcomings, search for better terms, and then we move on. But The Sportswriter may be a few bridges too far.
It seemed like every few pages--literally every three pages or so--there was a cringe-inducing description of a Black person. The narrator might go to his girlfriend's family's for Easter dinner, and the NBA game on TV would show how "two giant Negros start to shuffle for a loose ball, and a vicious fight breaks out almost instantly." A few pages later, and the narrator looks up from dinner as "the black players look fierce, and the white boys, pale and thin-armed, seem to want to be peacemakers." Driving through cities, turning on the TV, sitting at a bar, the narrator had many chances to gaze at Black people and offer some brief, often awful, remark. In fact, in one of the only conversations he actually had with a Black person, the taxi driver offered him a hundred-dollar whore. This sort of throwaway description might happen once or twice in a Bellow or Cheever novel, and it would be wrong then. Cheever or Bellow, however, would transcend the momentary ignorance with a great novel about something else. But The Sportswriter, over the course of the novel, never shakes its bias. It's worse than Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, or any other troubling early-to-mid twentieth century text, and the descriptions do nothing to elevate the character or the themes. Astonishingly, it was written in 1986. And here, I think, I've found the place where the otherwise masterful elements are submerged by the moral failures of the text.
