A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter is a strange book: highly erotic, Salter nevertheless manages to remove all the energy surrounding sex and passion from his characters’ manifestation of their vividly-portrayed sexual appetite. Salter’s narrator, the voyeur to the affair, tells us, with a trace of envy, “There’s enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it. Not that I believe it shouldn’t exist, no, no, but this [story] is only a thin, reflecting sliver which somehow keeps catching the light.” The story does catch light but, at least for me, it never caught fire. Perhaps it was the pace of the book, dreamlike and languid, or the basic squalidness of the situation: Dean, a Yale drop-out, takes possession of Annie, a young French woman and fulfills all his fantasies (and to be fair, hers as well) but with never an intention to remain with her. He is educated, well-off, tasteful with a certain flair; she is uneducated, lower-class, and dresses badly (at least according to Dean). There is plenty of passion between the two but never a chance for love.
Other than the phallus-centric descriptions of sexual activity, the rest of the novel is infused with inactivity and inertia. Dean and Annie eat and have sex, while the narrator reads and imagines others having sex. There are a few forays into Paris for all night drinking, eating, and some dancing, and some touristic visits to towns and villages in the provinces, including the chateaux of the Loire, but even these trips are without energy or excitement. France under Salter’s pen is shadowed by melancholy, infused with an atmosphere of languor, even anguish, and undeniable portents of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
The narrator is the strangest of characters. He does nothing, other than facilitate the initial meeting between Dean and Annie by being holed up in the quiet town of Autun and allowing Dean to come and stay with him. The narrator remains in the background, observer of the relationship from afar, and as becomes clear, inventor of the relationship: the entire affair is created out of his imaginings and what the heck does that say about him? He is either engaging in onanistic pleasure by relating this story that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with the infallibility of the male organ, or he is a moody youth, pleasuring himself with the doomed aspect of the affair, and yet admiring Dean and Annie for at least giving it their all. In the end, what did the affair matter? Maybe that is Salter’s point, that life is irrelevant and what and who you do is a sport and a pastime only. I remain unconvinced.
Nina, I think you should re-read Salter in a few years. A Sport and a Pastime is one of the masterpieces of fiction of the 20th century. First, the book is not about the plot, it’s about the poetic texture Salter creates, and the way the poetic gradually overtakes the prosaic in the second half of the book — exquisite! Second, the way the narrator slowly infuses himself into the story is designed to make you think about everything he (and we) run through our minds — what’s real and what isn’t? How can we know? By the end, the reader is left to wonder if anything that transpired between the lovers was true. And, just as we find ourselves thinking this, we realize — it’s a work of fiction! Similar to John Fowles The Magus (another masterpiece), Salter got me to care so much about the characters that, like the narrator, I became part of the story — or did the story become part of my reality? That’s what’s great about this book. Happy reading.