Ten Days Early: Know When I See It and This Isn't

Sorry to begin too early, Slackers, but I put through a reserve request and the library garnered most of them right away. I finished A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter in a couple of days since it is less than 200 pages. Bosh! It was not time well spent.

What I left out from the summary of Paz' analysis of love and eroticism are his catalogues of what they are not. They are not found in the libertine, nor the person who objectifies his love object desiring to possess that person, only to discover that this passion of "greed" turns the object into a person who subjugates the libertine into an object himself.

Such a person is Phillipe Dean, a Yale dropout (one of the reasons I selected the book knowing a couple myself) who is financially dependent on his father (again a reprise for me) and who believes that a mistress is a prerequisite of his grand tour of France. Dean is in his early twenties and his lust interest, Anne-Marie just out of her teens. Dean's debasement and abuse of Anne-Marie is not sexual, although there is plenty of the wanna-be voyeur in the story. His is a socio-economic humiliation. He craves her body while finding disgust in her teeth and breath; he transports her around French countryside chateaux and auberges in a rusty Delange but feigns not knowing the language when he visits her parents and eats in their kitchen. He marries her with full intent of deserting her and flying back to America.

Maybe one could look at the story from Anne-Marie's point of view and hope that the red flame of passion turned into the blue flame of love, but her motives too are financial, expecting an improvement in class and life style that Dean cannot pay for on his own. The reader has no sympathy or identification with either of them.

What is more disturbing is that the entire story is told by an unnamed narrator, who seems to be a Yale grad hobnobbing with the Northeastern blue bloods who emigrated to Paris to intermarry. The narrator, who could not possibly know Dean and Anne-Marie's itinerary let alone the couplings in there hotels, concedes: "I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that."

Perhaps the most author-revealing quote is: "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 rearranged 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." (Unlike Paz, the only quote worth citing at length.)

Is this story then just a fantasy of the narrator, a projection of his frustrated attraction to his friend's wife Claude? Is it an embodiment of his alienation from France? Personally, I don't care. Even if I wasn't looking for lust as a manifestation of love, this novel would not appeal to me. Salter considered it his best work. I can't imagine reading his others (even though they are basically war stories.)

Hate to start the new year like this, but Slackers, I read the first couple of pages of Zola's Nana waiting for my annual mammogram at 7 this morning and I believe that one bodes well.