In 1986, Richard Ford took an Alice Hoffman novel out into his back yard and shot it. Hoffman had had the temerity to give Ford’s third novel, The Sportswriter, a middling review in the New York Times. Ford at the time believed The Sportswriter to be his masterpiece. It tells the story of Frank Bascombe, once an author of short stories, now, in his late 30s, a sportswriter living a middle-class life in the ordinary town of Haddam, New Jersey.
Frank is, when we first meet him, divorced and mourning the death of his nine-year-old son, Ralph. The action of the novel begins in a cemetery, where Frank and his ex-wife pay a dawn visit to Ralph’s grave. Nonetheless, The Sportswriter is about that great American theme, the pursuit of happiness. Can you be happy in the face of the horrors that life throws at you? Frank’s answer is a provisional yes. Hoffman, in her review, suggested that Frank’s happiness was just a project of denial – that he was an egoist who “chooses to ignore tangled, emotionally charged family relationships, fixating instead on non-relationships and non-events”.
