The Sportswriter

Frank Bascombe, a divorced, thirty eight year old sportswriter living in the fictional New Jersey suburb of Haddam, narrates a single Easter weekend that unravels most of what little stability he has left. Years earlier his young son Ralph died of Reye's syndrome, a loss that sent Frank into what he calls a dreaming, disengaged version of himself, one that led him to abandon a promising literary career for magazine sportswriting and, eventually, to the collapse of his marriage to the woman he refers to throughout only as X, now dating Frank's own doctor. Frank takes his girlfriend Vicki Arcenault on a reporting trip to Detroit to interview a paralyzed former football player, hoping the excursion will settle their relationship, but the visit sours; the athlete proves bitter rather than inspiring, Frank is caught searching through Vicki's belongings, and the trip ends early and badly. Back home, Frank's friend Walter Luckett, a fellow member of a divorced men's group, confesses to a recent sexual encounter with another man and later kills himself, leaving behind a note asking Frank to find an illegitimate daughter in Florida who turns out, once Frank investigates, not to exist at all. At an Easter dinner with Vicki's family, Frank learns definitively that X is involved with his own physician, and Vicki ends their relationship outright soon after, striking Frank in the face when he tries physically to stop her from leaving. The novel closes with Frank, having lost the version of a settled life he had been quietly hoping Vicki might restore, relocating to Florida on his own and arriving, however tentatively, at something closer to peace than anything the weekend itself offered him.

Ford writes in a slow, ruminative first person present tense that mirrors Frank's own drifting, half present state of mind, and the novel reads unhurried and interior by design, less concerned with what happens to Frank than with the careful, self aware, often self deceiving way he narrates it to himself.