SOURCE: "Realty Meltdown," in London Review of Books, August 24, 1995, p. 23.

[In the following review, Dyer praises Ford's ability to capture the psychological dynamics of a situation by describing a few simple movements.]

Richard Ford's narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sportswriter. This was the making of Ford. It wasn't until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist.

At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career. He had published a 'promising' collection of stories, Blue Autumn, and had then started on a novel which he never finished. It was going to be about an ex-Marine in Tangiers, a place Frank had never visited but which he 'assumed was like Mexico'. In his late thirties, with the abandoned manuscript in a drawer, Frank looks back with bemusement at these efforts to sound 'hard nosed and...