A literary, sexually explicit novel written in 1967 that is about the absence of sex, and love, written from a strongly male point of view.

Our narrator is a man in his thirties, an expatriate living in France, acutely feeling the lack of female affection in his life. He lives alone in a borrowed house. An attempt by his friends to set him up with a woman they think he might hit it off with goes nowhere; he is incapable of making the connection ("It's exciting to be in her company, but I'm always a little afraid of what she might say next, and this fear causes me to be helpless.")

A slightly younger American expatriate arrives to stay with him. Dean has a relationship with a young French woman, which sets our narrator off on flights of envying imaginations. He reminds us, "I am not telling the truth about Dean, I am inventing him. I am creating him out of my own inadequacies, you must always remember that."

And what creations he comes up with:

With a touch like flowers, she is gently tracing the base of his cock, driven by now all the way into her, touching his balls, and beginning to writhe slowly beneath him in a sort of obedient rebellion while in his own dream he rises a little and defines the moist rim of her cunt with his finger, and as he does, he comes like a bull. They remain close for a long time, still without talking. It is these exchanges which cement them, that is the terrible thing. These atrocities induce them towards love.

Our narrator finds in Dean, thanks to Dean's seemingly effortless success with women, an object of envy and admiration, and his self-professed uncontrollable fantasies about Dean's love life eventually lead to self-hatred.

These long months. It's as if I've been in prison. My ribs show. My flesh is white, so white I'm ashamed to take off my clothes. And with it is a bitterness that soaks in like brine.

It's a devastating off-center portrait of an unhappy man who cannot achieve what he most desires, that intimate loving connection with another human being, told with brilliant not-strictly-linear prose by Salter.

One final passage to remember:

She has been a famous actress. I recognize her. The debris of a great star. Narrow lips. The face of a dedicated drinker. She constantly piles up her hair with her hands and then lets it fall. She laughs, but there is no sound. It's all in silence - she is made out of yesterdays.

( )

With perfectly intense prose, Salter tells a fevered love story that may not have happened. Or happened in very different ways. A mesmerous tale. ( )

I heard about this book in a strange way. I was reading John Irving's "A Son of the Circus". The main character and his wife go on a second honeymoon. His wife has brought along a book and seems interested in it. It turns out it's Salter's A Sport and a Pastime. They wind up asking each other what part did they really like and have them read it to each other. They each choose erotic passages challenging the other for an even better one. While Irving is capable of writing erotic passages on his own this felt to me to be erotica by proxy. They were clearly using these readings to get their juices going. I decided I needed to find out where this was coming from. That's when I decided to get my own copy of Salter's book.

A Sport and a Pastime stands out as leading the way in the second half of the twentieth century on how erotic descriptions can be integrated into literature without totally dominating the reader's attention. It's there and it's an important piece of book. But that's the point, it's just there. It's just a piece of what's going on. In a sense there's more to the story that just the sex. Yes there's lots of sex and it always seems to be part of the picture. In some sense it becomes natural. That's what couples at that point in their lives are likely to be doing. Maybe these two do it more than many of the others. What's different about them is we see exactly what they're doing.

The story has a thin plot. It can be summed up in just a few sentences. He's a Yale dropout, son of a wealthy family, driving an old exotic car that turns heads everywhere. He's trying to keep the party going before his money runs out. She's a few years younger and sees in him a possible life partner. She's a bit of an exhibitionist. For a few weeks they drive throughout France staying at hotels in several cities and eating at restaurants that seem to always look alike. They are sexual athletes, not really discovering each other, just enjoying each other. The likelihood of a happy ending seems remote. That's the story in a nutshell.

More importantly is how each of them looks at what they're doing. Both are in the moment, the present, and not concerned about where this is all going or what the future will bring. Much like Virginia Woolf's characters, what they're thinking about and what surrounds them is more important than what they're doing. He's not convinced this relationship has a future and is hoping he'll find a graceful way to get out of this. She's more convinced he's her future, but she is free and easy and in no way possessive. She even brings him home to her mother, who is more skeptical. At one point they even get married. More because it was easy than anything else.

The most challenging part of this was reading this with twenty-first century eyes. He's taking advantage of her, and she doesn't seem to mind. He takes things to the point where he's hurting her. She seems okay with it. Perhaps she had a goal and saw this as a way to get there. That part was a bit cringe worthy. Needless to say, it doesn't end well. But she is able to move on.

I've left out the details so as not to spoil it. Enjoy the read. I did. ( )

For me, the most interesting element to this novel was the narration. It starts out as a typical first-person narrative. An American man arrives in France boards a train and describes what he sees and experiences. It continues in this vein until the narrator meets and befriends Philip Dean. Soon after this Philip meets and falls in love with Ann Marie and all of a sudden, it's a story of a torrid love affair between Dean & Ann Marie, only it's still being told by the original narrator. And when I say torrid I do mean torrid. The sexual descriptions are of such specific detail they can only be told by a third-person omniscient perspective. And yet this drastic shift occurs so smoothly we almost don't feel it. The narrator still sounds exactly the same as the man telling the story about himself although he has become a mere bit player in the story. ( )

This novel grew on me as I read along. It turned into an affecting story of a young man whose life narrows and sinks into desperation after he drops out of an Ivy League college and goes to France seeking love, glamor, and pleasure. Salter is a Hemingway-school stylist who specializes in short sentences and somewhat longer ones that are frequently beautiful. The book sealed Salter's success in the mid-sixties and caused a stir for its many and graphic sex descriptions. ( )