SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “The Risks of Membership: Richard Ford's The Sportswriter.” Mississippi Quarterly 52, no. 1 (winter 1998-99): 73-88.

In the following essay, Folks contrasts the treatment of central themes in Ford's The Sportswriter and Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Folks observes that Ford's novel focuses on the themes of family, intimacy, labor, and the need for social connection.

In the first two sentences of The Sportswriter, Richard Ford sets forth the issues with which his novel will be most concerned: a man, his work, his home and sense of place, his relationship with family, and his expectation of “the good life.” Since Ford's writing has begun to be compared with that of Walker Percy, it would be well to consider the first sentences of The Last Gentleman, perhaps Percy's most canonical work and a book that announces its very different concerns: “a young man thinking,” the emptiness of physical...