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James Salter
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A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics) Paperback – August 22, 2006

by James Salter (Author), Reynolds Price (Introduction)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,400 ratings
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"As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime is the intensely carnal story―part shocking reality, part feverish dream ―of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen―and pages that burn with a rare intensity.
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  1. Print length
    208 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  4. Publication date
    August 22, 2006
  5. Dimensions
    5.55 x 0.55 x 8.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0374530505
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0374530501
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A tour de force of erotic realism, a romantic cliff-hanger; an opaline vision of Americans in France . . . A Sport and a Pastime succeeds as art must. It tells us about ourselves." - New York Times Book Review

About the Author

James Salter was the celebrated author of six novels (The Hunters, 1957; The Arm of Flesh, 1961; A Sport and a Pastime, 1967; Light Years, 1975; Solo Faces, 1979; and All That Is, 2013) and three books of stories (Dusk and Other Stories, 1988; Last Night, 2005; and Collected Stories, 2013), as well a memoir, Burning the Days (1997). He also had a successful Hollywood career, most notably as the screenwriter of Downhill Racer (1969). Born in New Jersey in 1926 and raised in New York City, he attended West Point during World War II and served as an officer and a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force from 1945 to 1957. He drew on his combat experiences in Korea for his first two novels, though it was not until the controversial but now-classic A Sport and a Pastime that he considered that he had come close to measuring up to his own standards. He was a recipient of the 1989 PEN/Faulkner Award and the 2012 PEN/Malamud Award. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2015.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (August 22, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374530505
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374530501
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.55 x 0.55 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,400 ratings

About the author

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James Salter

James Salter

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James Salter (b. 1925) was a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Salter grew up in New York City and was a career officer and Air Force pilot until his mid-thirties, when the success of his first novel (The Hunters, 1957) led to a fulltime writing career. Salter’s potent, lyrical prose has earned him acclaim from critics, readers, and fellow novelists. His novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967) was hailed by the New York Times as “nearly perfect as any American fiction.”

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
1,400 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

mrthinkndrink
5.0 out of 5 stars A very engaging and significant read
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2018
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The story is straightforward: an upper class college drop-out travels to France for a few months of find-myself-R-and-R. His intent is for a relatively short stay, enlisting various friends and friends of the family to facilitate his adventures. Not surprisingly, he meets a lovely young French girl about his age and they fall into an intense, relaxed, enticing, erotic, playful, serious love/lust relationship. This is all reported on by the (self-admittedly) very unreliable narrator, one of the friends of the young drop out, who cobbles a story, an intimate, tender, sexual, sensitive story from bits told to him by the protagonist and from his own erotic and literary imaginings.

And yet... the writing is quiet and powerful. The narrative flows with a comfortable ease, whether discussing Dean's (the drop out) infatuation with the classic car he's managed to acquire for the duration of his stay, his interactions with the well-to-do friends of his father, or, more importantly, with the regular and routine meals that he and Ann-Marie, his lover, share in various restaurants and hotel dining rooms. The vibe of the era and of these beautifully-rendered, yet mundane scenes rings with a startling authenticity.

Underlying it all is a young, fresh, smoldering eroticism that gives shape and substance while never veering into the roadside ditch of trite or crude sexuality. There is sex, there is a constant sexual consciousness, but it is never handled in any manner other than a celebration of youth and of a relaxed, mutually-accepted eroticism. The times may have forced the author's hand, or more accurately, informed his approach, as this book was written in a period when explicit sexuality was only recently condoned by society at large or by the publishing industry in particular.

The book held many pleasures and the seamless structure and writing were certainly apparent, almost from page one. However, it wasn't until I neared the final portion that I realized I was, and had been, reading a great work. Fowles, Ford, Hemingway and others come to mind. None, in my opinion, have dome it better.
10 people found this helpful
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JAK
4.0 out of 5 stars Americans in France
Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2015
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I was having one of those pointless internal debates, is this a 4 or a 3 star novel.I opted for 4.SPORT is a surprisingly strange novel and Salter an intriguing and tricky writer.The narrator is an American photographer in France.He seems less interested in himself than in his young friend Dean and his affair with Anne-Marie , a lower class French girl.The bulk of the novel is the narrators tale of these two ,told in graphic sexual detail.The thing is , not only is this voyeuristic, you have the feeling it's not true.I'm not entirely sure these two were really supposed to exist.There is no way the narrator can know the details he reports, giving the story not only a voyeuristic feel but the feel of a masturbatory fantasy.Occasionally the narrator talks about his interactions with his friends in Paris and this is quite interesting.It's reminiscent of Salter's LIGHT YEARS.Just as I was about to scream if I read anymore about Dean and Anne -Marie ,that story started to work for me too.Salter seems to effect me that way.

I'm tempted to say Salter should be more popular than he is but that's a bit silly.Yes, he is an excellent stylist.However he has a chilly elitist quality to him.That's not a criticism.I rather like it ! But that is no recipe for popularity.From what I've read about him Salter was an impressive person and his characters are not the common folk.Even if you look at my sketchy comments , think what we're dealing with in terms of characters, American photographers in France, Dean a Yale drop-out in France and aside from Anne -Marie , most of the others that appear are wealthy American expatriates.This effect may be even more pronounced in LIGHT YEARS.Interestingly ,I suspect it reflects the life the author lived.Not a bad one from what I can determine.
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JEDrury
3.0 out of 5 stars Tiresome, repetitive, barely saved by its ending !
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2023
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Salter’s “A Sport and a Pastime,” published in 1967, received rave reviews at the time. Though short at under 200 pages, the novel seems overly long, very tiresome (by shifting voices without warning), and repetitive in scene after scene as a young unmarried couple (she’s French, energetic and middle class, he’s a languid American college drop out from Yale) explore the small towns of France by car (or foot), eat three meals a day, engage in repeated rounds of vividly described sex, go to sleep naked, and the next day repeats their same routine. Only at the end does the story become worthwhile as Salter, who writes beautifully, brings meaning and clarity to his tale.
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Alison
5.0 out of 5 stars Inevitable Sorrow
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2014
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Spoiler alert.
The lyricism nearly killed me. The subject matter filled my whole body with longing and intense erotic heat. I have never read anything like it. The entire book is suffused with the certainty of a sad, empty ending. The love story is potent and very real; maybe because I am a woman of 55 and no longer the eager, voluptuous 15 year old playmate of a man just a few years older than myself, I see myself unflattered in the unsophisticated French girl. Playmate is the right word, however. I was never a victim of the intense but ultimately fleeting attentions of the man who loved me so briefly. The book seemed, for all the beautiful detail of the little French towns with their lovely and comforting collections of delicious French smells, to be a catalog of the actions a man must take if he is interested in exploring the boundaries and pleasures of anal intercourse with a sweetly compliant young woman. The painstaking travel to small pristine towns, one after another. The lavish food consumed so joyfully. The hours and hours of sex aimed at securing her trust and the expressions of love required to guarantee her enthusiastic engagement in his simple erotic wish for anal congress made the young man seem coarse and greedy for all his patient lovemaking. He could have had it for less. I knew it would be sad and it was. A beautiful book, it is the true human experience of love complete with the rapture and disappointment. I do heartily recommend this book, though it broke my heart into several pieces.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Peter_32
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on December 8, 2017
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Roger Stowell
5.0 out of 5 stars Sport and a Pastime
Reviewed in France on July 22, 2019
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C'était un livre. Je le lisait mais il ne me plaisait pas beaucoup. Mais pas cher et en bon état. Livraison d'Etats Unis ver la France prends beaucoup de temps et ca ne vous regarde de tout.
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Guy O.
5.0 out of 5 stars Salter on the erotic and the aesthetic life
Reviewed in Germany on March 26, 2018
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Perhaps the supreme novel on the orientation of life around the values of eroticism, sensuality, and aestheticism. Salter is without peer on the small towns of France in the 1960s -- the feel of the air in the autumn, the smell of the restaurants and old cafes, walking in the ancient streets. All this rendered in a prose of great beauty, precision, and compression. It is difficult to contest the judgment of Richard Ford that "sentence for sentence, Salter is the master."
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5.0 out of 5 stars A Readers Review
Reviewed in India on April 10, 2015
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A SPORT AND A PASTIME
What do you write about a piece of contemporary fiction that came out nearly 50 years ago and you ended up reading it now instead of a few decades ago? How do you do justice to someone who writes with the ease and exactitude that Salter does? Would you not need a totally new vocabulary to capture even a fraction of how he emotes?
I have ended up approaching Salter front to back in the past few months – started with All That Is, Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days (jointly with his wife), Light Years, and then Collected Stories & A Sport and Pastime – the last two almost contemporaneously. This is due to my own lack of awareness of this writer but have enjoyed every one of them – well, Life is Meals is very different so put it aside for the time being.
Read somewhere that in a recent interview he called A Sport And A Pastime as his finest. This is not the Paris/France of Hemingway, Liebling, Gopnik or even Woody Allen. Set largely in the provincial town of Autun in the 60’s with occasional forays into the high society of Paris. It a story of love and longing seen through the eyes of a voyeur or should one say the lens of another since he is photographer, or is it- ‘It’s a story of things that never existed, although even the faintest doubt of that, the smallest possibility, plunges everything into darkness.’
Salter is a master at changing timelines, moving spatially and altering the mood almost at will in a space of a sentence or two. Very often there is nothing linear in the narrative and you have to hold tight for the exhilarating sharp bends.
Within the first couple of pages you have descriptions such as the ‘narrow mouth, cast down at the corners, weighted there by the sourness of knowledge’ and a ‘stomach which is already like a Rubens’. This is acuity that takes hold your imagination and populates it. Also sample this – ‘She has been a famous actress… debris of a great star….. she is made out of yesterdays.’ Talking of a small group of youth at a bar ‘they sit in boredom, polishing the gestures of contempt.’ It is like painting using language, a lesser talent would take a paragraph to convey the same, if ever it could. The language is sparing, flensed of all that is superfluous, the sentences very often just a few words yet voluptuous in content.
France in the early 60’s, still quite poor, after effects of the war leading people to manage as well as they can. Anne-Marie, a waif like figure in her late teens seen in a bar accompanying a couple of black US servicemen, we are left to guess what transpires. Though it does not take much, the reference to Manon Lescaut is there, a signal though not totally apposite. Philip Dean, the conquistador, an insouciant Yale dropout, the clever mathematician weary of his gifts, to whom everything comes easy except money, driving around in a borrowed Delage 1952 convertible. And turns up a little after, with her in tow, much to the priapic torture of the expositor who waits for the smallest of signs of come hither from the divorced but still desirable Mme Claude Picquet. For him ‘life is like a game of solitaire, and every once in a while there is a move.’
Salter has never been shy writing of the physicality of sex in his books. It is just another aspect of living. Phillip and Anne-Marie in the hotel rooms, through the winter and the arrival of spring, Nancy, Beaune, Dijon, Sens and Autun - what was merely corporeal, her submissiveness, the exploration of her marmoreal body turns to a certain dependency for him. Phillip’s tumescence in the vernal, petrichor morning hardening under her fingers, again and again. The exchange of little facts of their respective lives, purchase of a gift for her which can be ill afforded, the first sign of annoyance at her ordinariness. It is never clear if for him there is unconditional love, but it inevitably levies a tax of forgiveness. Even with her depressing imperfections he is pulled into a vortex by her rubescent nakedness. Introducing her to the sybaritic delights of lovemaking, delighting in her acquiescence to his every demand.
While reading his book, for me there was the continual visual refrain to Hieronimus Bosch’s triptych, Garden of Earthly Delights. Not its theological or moralistic interpretation of purity and sinfulness as is usually believed. But more the creation of life in innocence and the prelapsarian playful activity governed by ubiquitous passion and lust.
Salter is someone who can take words that are black and white on paper and turn them into the most glorious imagery and hues in the reader’s head – ‘It’s later afternoon, the green is trembling’. In Light Years there is a more refined sensuality, a keener perception of relationships. But the rawness that is evident in this one is bitter sweet. And that is how this ends after their last trip, a ‘feast of love’, married yet not, an à bientôt that turns to a final au revoir by the mocking gods. As I am reminded time and time again from another conversation, Salter’s coruscating prose is always such a delight.
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peter letchford
4.0 out of 5 stars Sensual imagery and imagination in France
Reviewed in Australia on August 15, 2015
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An interesting and very different book about life in France. With lots of sensual imagery and imagination a literary tome.
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