The Sportswriter

The Sportswriter
by Richard Ford
read: 2021
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels

Ford sets The Sportswriter after a lot of the most critical events in the life of titular protagonist / narrator Frank Bascombe. Frank has gone from promising young writer to abandoning his fiction, from family man, to grieving father of a son struck down by untimely illness, to divorcée. The novel begins after all those events, with a protagonist who largely has come to terms with his tragedies and failures, and settled in comfortably to a life as a sportswriter in a New Jersey suburb.

Frank's maturity from life experience brings perspective as he navigates the events of the novel, as does the grounded reality of being a sportswriter. Late in the book, he sums things up with the observation "The only truth that can never be a lie, let me tell you, is life itself—the thing that happens."

The Good Soldier

The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford
read: 2011
Modern Library #30, Guardian 1000 Novels

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."  I was flipping through a few of the Modern Library Top 100 books (having downloaded several of the free public-domain ones), looking for something that grabbed me, when I came across that opening line to The Good Soldier.  Needless to say, I had to read the book after that.

The most notable aspect of The Good Soldier is the narrative voice.  The story is narrated in first-person by  John Dowell, an American whose wife Florence was having an affair with Captain Ashburnham (the title character), who is also married (to the somewhat-manipulative Leonora).  Dowell is often used as an example of an unreliable narrator, but what's interesting to me is what the imperfect narration does to the tone of the novel.  The story takes on comic elements at times, as the reader is plainly able to see what is going on even as Dowell remains ignorant.  But The Good Soldier is not a comedy; true to the opening line, it is tragic.  This tension between the comedic and tragic elements make it an interesting read.