Dreamworld

By R.Z. Sheppard

American readers love lonely guys, with their emotional weightlessness and tender detachments. Given such an edge, Richard Ford should have little trouble becoming a literary heartthrob. Author of two earlier novels, A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck, he has already demonstrated his storytelling abilities and technical skills. He has also cultivated an engaging narrative voice, one of those down-home deliveries that can sound like Huck Finn with a college education.

Twenty years ago, Frank Bascombe, hero of Ford's new novel, probably would have been a college English instructor with a stalled novel, a broken marriage and a string of women who leave him anesthetized and wistful. That was when the literary man was something of a culture hero. Bascombe has given up on that idea, although he retains some of the baggage: he has an abandoned novel titled Tangier, an ex-wife whom he calls X, and Vicki, a good ole girl from Texas who is a nurse and an effective pain killer. To earn a living, he covers ball games and interviews athletes for a weekly sports magazine. It is an honorable job and adequate compensation for his lost promise. Best of all, facts, deadlines and airline food suppress higher thoughts. Writing about victories and defeats, comers and has-beens teaches him an austere lesson. "There are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they're over, and that has to be enough." That goes for his fleeting fame as the author of a volume of good short stories and the brief life-span of his son Ralph, who died of Reye's syndrome at age nine.

The Sportswriter is an appreciation of the mystery of things as they are, a somewhat subversive notion because the book's action takes place over a long Easter weekend. By design or coincidence, there are 13 chapters plus a section called "The End," suggesting an ironic play on the 14 Stations of the Cross. The first chapter is a stunner. At dawn on a Good Friday in the Princeton-like community of Haddam, N.J., Bascombe and X meet at Ralph's grave to mark the boy's birthday. They talk more honestly than they ever could as husband and wife. She is a gifted golfer with hopes of joining the L.P.G.A. tour. There are two other Bascombe children who live with her in a new development house. Frank has kept the old Tudor residence rather than move to Manhattan. He rents the top floor to a Gabonese theology student, belongs to a divorced men's club and strives to be ordinary.

The difficulty is that other people think he is special. As a writer, Bascombe is supposed to be smart and sensitive. But mostly he feels dumb and dreamy, "a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality." Not a good state for a sportswriter. But as a fictional character dealing with loss and solitude, Bascombe accounts for many affecting moments. His attempt to interview a former football player confined to a wheelchair is every journalist's nightmare: a hostile subject who undermines the project. The breakup with Nurse Vicki reveals that chilling instant when involved parties realize they have little in common. The sad truth about one's limits of interest and sympathy unfolds when a man Bascombe hardly knows insists on confessing his homosexual affair.

Bascombe is appealing, but a novel about a man who has lost his will to write novels is always in danger of trying the reader's patience. His repeated assertions that uncertainty is the only certainty are a bit modish, as is his belief that literature is not in the enlightening business, but should aim to create "disturbances." Nevertheless, Ford accomplishes the first requirement of fiction: the making of a convincing illusion. Frank Bascombe inhabits an all too believable dreamworld. --By R.Z. Sheppard