A Sport and A Pastime

A Sport And A Pastime by James Salter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Salter’s terse, precise, photographic style is the standout feature of this slim novel, and it’s used to narrate the increasingly fevered imaginings of a love-affair that is mostly a piece of erotic fantasy. Dean is a college dropout and a wastrel, stringing along a working class girl in France and burning through his father’s money. It’s obviously reprehensible, but Salter’s unnamed narrator is nonetheless bewitched and obsessed with the intensity of Dean’s devotion to the pleasures of the moment at the expense of taking any responsibility. But life can’t just be a sport and a pastime – Dean’s fate suggests a final judgement on the risks of living fast, while his hoodwinked lover, eager for marriage and a family, ends up with the happy ending.

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