Reynolds Price called James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime (1967) “as perfect as any American fiction I know.”1 But this admirable novel has two notable imperfections. The narrator admits that he describes scenes that he cannot possibly have witnessed. And the theme stated by the hero and the narrator is different from the one that emerges from the characters and action. Salter's comments on the novel describe a different book than the one he actually wrote.
Salter's short, compressed novel, the story of a love affair, takes place in 1962–63. The two main characters are Phillip Dean, a twenty-four-year-old American, and his lover Anne-Marie Costallat, an eighteen-year-old French girl. Phillip is a schoolboy hero and math prodigy who has dropped out of Yale after a year, traveled in Mexico and California, and is trying to find his true self. He comes from a wealthy family but has no...
