A Sport and a Pastime
by James Salter

The cover of the new paperback edition shows a beautiful woman's naked back. The pose is classical. The message is sexual. Not the cover Butler would have chosen, but anything that “sells” this 192-page novel is a good thing.

If you're like most readers, you have never read James Salter; worse, you've probably never heard of him. The reason: He labors under a curse. He's considered a “writer's writer” --- that is, too good for the masses to appreciate. So although the two New York Times reviews for “A Sport and a Pastime” in 1967 were raves --- Reynolds Price called it "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know,” Webster Schott described it as “a tour de force in erotic realism" --- it's fallen into that saddest of categories, the “cult classic.”

In fact, this is an addictively readable novel. No one writes about France more lovingly than Salter; read a few paragraphs and you'll want to buy a ticket. Not to Paris , though Salter gets its late nights and parties perfectly. To the small towns, the “real” France , where the smell of wood smoke is in the air and life is played out to the cadence of seasonal change.

In one of these towns, the unnamed narrator of this novel has borrowed the house of some rich friends. He is soon joined by Phillip Dean, an American dropout from Yale. Dean is a doom: a beautiful loser, a bundle of questions in search of answers he'll never find. In such a condition, a man looks for solutions in love --- well, in sex. And so it is that Dean selects a French shop girl as his erotic target. Anne-Marie, at once wise and innocent, cannot resist him. Soon they are creating their own encyclopedia of sex.

Writing great sex is one of the hardest tricks in fiction. Salter succeeds brilliantly, in large part because he's such a sensual writer to begin with. Surfaces fascinate him, he loves to observe. And, don't forget, the book is written by a voyeur. [Is this a “dirty” book? Yes, in the sense that the prose inspires home movies in your head. No, in the sense that sex is an integral part of the book; it's not there to titillate us.]

The last thing the reader of a 192-page book needs is a too-precise recounting of the plot. What happens to Dean, how Anne-Marie's sexual education changes her --- you'll find out soon enough. But what will convince you that you must find out is the writing. Here is a sample:

"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 rear-ranged 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 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."

Cool prose, every word chosen, re-considered, affirmed. Mannered? Only until you get used to it. Then Salter takes you over, and your world falls away, and then the book itself dissolves, and you are taken over by its characters.

--- by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

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Copyright 2004 by Head Butler Inc.