The sports reporter

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The sports reporter (English: The Sportswriter ) is a novel by the American writer Richard Ford . It was published in 1986 and, when it was nominated for the PEN / Faulkner Award, it became the author's first major success. The novel is set on an Easter weekend , the events of which are reported from the first-person perspective of the divorced sports reporter Frank Bascombe. In the novels Independence Day ( Independence Day , 1995), the situation in the country ( The Lay of the Land , 2006) and Frank ( Let Me Be Frank With You repeated in 2014) returned Ford to his protagonist Frank Bascombe back.

content

On the morning of April 20th, Good Friday , Frank Bascombe meets, as every year, on the anniversary of the death of his eldest son Ralphs with his divorced wife X at his grave. Ralph died of Reye's syndrome at the age of nine . His death rocked the marriage of his parents, who divorced two years later. Frank Bascombe, who after a successful debut band had given up writing in favor of the more superficial activity of a sports reporter, fell more and more into a state of reverie and escape from reality. He left his family to teach at Berkshire College, a teaching position he soon stopped because he did not want to explain the world, and began various affairs with other women. Of all things, the non-intimate relationship with a flight acquaintance finally became the reason for the divorce when X discovered a carefree tone in her correspondence that her marriage had long since lost.

A week before his 39th birthday, Bascombe continues to live in the small town of Haddam, New Jersey , where he meets regularly with other men in a "Divorced Men Club." One of the premise of dealing with men, however, is that you keep your feelings to yourself. Bascombe is embarrassed when Walter Luckett, a member of the club, confesses to him a homosexual adventure that has thrown him into intense confusion. Bascombe himself has planned a short trip to Detroit for the holidays , where he does his job, interviewing former American football player Herb Wallagher, who has been in a wheelchair since an accident, with a few hours of fun at the side of his new girlfriend Vicki Arcenault , a 30 year old nurse.

But in Detroit nothing is developing as expected. Herb Wallagher turns out to be a bitter psychopath who does not utter the edifying sentences that are needed for a sports report. In a changed city, Bascombe can't find his student favorite places and a storm is brewing. Bascombe and Vicki are leaving early on Saturday night, and although they date their family on Easter Sunday, their hitherto carefree relationship appears to have taken a first jump. Walter Luckett has settled in Bascombe's house, who shows signs of growing despair, but is thrown out by the tired Bascombe when he kisses him.

Visiting Vicki's family on Easter Sunday is also a debacle. Bascombe tries to maintain a good relationship with her father and stepmother, which he seems to be successful, but when he is seduced over dinner into expressing his opinion on the importance of teamwork in sports - Bascombe refuses to use people as interchangeable cogs seen in the gears of a larger machine - Vicki becomes aware for the first time of the spiritual and emotional distance between them. She rejects a desperate marriage proposal from Bascombe and knocks him down with a punch as he tries to approach her. Bascombe is called back to Haddam, where the police ask him to identify a body. It's Walter Luckett, who shot himself. At the side of his ex-wife, Bascombe enters Luckett's house, where he finds an open copy of his book. When he wants to sleep with her in the dead man's bed, however, X rejects him indignantly.

In a short-circuit act, Bascombe drives to Gotham in the evening and visits his editorial office, where a special session on the upcoming NFL draft is taking place. A young intern named Catherine Flaherty approaches Bascombe and admits her admiration. With that she suddenly chases away his gloomy thoughts and arouses his erotic interest. They go out and spend the next few days together. Then Luckett's last wish leads him to Florida , where he is supposed to track down the illegitimate daughter of the dead man. The trail leads nowhere, but Bascombe is enjoying a few months in the south. He has the impression that the mourning for his son Ralph has finally ended and that he has shed his previous life like an old skin and is now open to new things again.

background

Richard Ford's first two published novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976) and The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), received mostly good reviews - the debut was nominated for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel - but sold poorly . Looking back, Ford commented, “I realized that there was a huge gap between what I could do and what would work with readers. […] I had the chance to write two novels and neither of them caused much excitement, so maybe I should find a real job and make a living. ”So, Ford became a sports reporter for Inside Sports in 1981 , until the magazine was hired again in the following year. He then applied to Sports Illustrated to no avail . It wasn't until his prospects as a sports reporter were battered that Ford turned back to literature and wrote a novel about a sports reporter and former writer.

Originally the protagonist should be called Slocum - after Joshua Slocum , who sailed around the world single-handedly. When Ford learned that Joseph Heller's protagonist in Something Happened was also called Slocum, he changed the name to Bascombe. For a long time, Ford did not find a suitable name for Bascombe's wife and only marked her mention in the novel with an "X". Later he found the omission of the once familiar name, which Bascombe can no longer bring to his lips, to be just the thing. It was only named Ann Dykstra in the follow-up novel Independence Day . A large part of the development of the character Frank Bascombe had Ford's wife, who encouraged him to write about people who strive for happiness. Ford found it was "a lot more challenging - especially for me - to find a language for people who strive to be better and happier than for people wrestling with murder and mayhem."

The judgment of an editor at the New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf on the first hundred pages of the novel was devastating. The editor recommended that Ford put the manuscript in a drawer and move on to other business. Ford struggled with the feedback for six months before he decided to continue working, since it was the book he wanted to write. Gary Fisketjon eventually bought the novel for Vintage Books and has been Ford's editor ever since. The novel became the breakthrough that Ford had hoped for, selling 60,000 copies by 1988. The total American circulation up to 1996 was three times as high.

Awards

The Sportswriter reached the final of the PEN / Faulkner Award in 1987 . Time named the novel one of the five best books of the year. In 2005, The Sportswriter magazine included Time in its 100 best English-language novels selection from 1923 to 2005 .

expenditure

  • Richard Ford: The Sportswriter . Vintage, New York 1986, ISBN 0-374-16189-5 .
  • Richard Ford: The sports reporter . From the American by Hans Hermann. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1989, ISBN 3-498-02062-5 .
  • Richard Ford: The sports reporter . From the American by Hans Hermann. dtv, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-423-14271-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See article Inside Sports in the English language Wikipedia .
  2. ^ "I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep. ”Quotation from: Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  3. ↑ "I know it's much more of a challenge - for me in particular - to find language for people essaying to be better and happier, than for people wrestling with murder and mayhem." Quoted from: Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  4. ↑ Bruce Weber: Richard Ford's Uncommon Characters . In: The New York Times, April 10, 1988.
  5. Jump up ↑ Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  6. ↑ Past Winners & Finalists at the PEN / Faulkner Award .
  7. ↑ Elizabeth A. Brennan, Elizabeth C. Clarage: Who's who of Pulitzer Prize winners . Oryx Press, Phoenix 1999, ISBN 1-57356-111-8 , p. 248.
  8. ^ Richard Lacayo: All-TIME 100 Novels: The Sportswriter . In: Time from January 8, 2010.