Hedonism run amuck is about all I can say. A spate of movies, Closer and We Don't Live Here Anymore, and the book I'm currently reading and fighting with all my might not to toss across the room in disgust, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, paint a pretty bleak picture of the current state of relationships between the sexes. In sum, it appears as if no one is capable of being faithful and infidelity is as acceptable as any other relationship quirk. This is by no means a new thing, and it won't be the last, but it's hard for me to believe that this is how people behave. Married men, especially those who look like Jude Law, have little trouble attracting willing women with whom to commiserate their affairs. Does this type of thing occur as frequently as is suggested by these works? I can't say from either experience or secondhand knowledge. The back and forth between affairs and the continuously boorish behavior on the part of the male aggressors is such a stale and depleted idea that I'm stunned that anyone thinks it's original any longer. Some works on this subject definitely, for lack of a better term, work, like Tom Perrotta's Little Children. I'm not sure what other works are trying to accomplish. Do they want you to hate the characters? Are you supposed to sympathize with anyone? I rarely do, and I don't think I'm wrong in not doing so.

My real problem with Ford's writing is that the main character, Frank Boscombe, is portrayed throughout the majority of the book as a sophisticated man, a writer who not so much failed at his art but rather quit. He's not overly academic, although he was a teacher who couldn't teach, and he seems more like a man who would shun such groups. And he seems to have a poignant wisdom that other characters, who are inevitably much more fallible than him, aspire towards being. In other words, he doesn't seem like a phony, but, in reality, someone you could have a conversation with that wasn't devoid of all intellectual content. But Ford can't sustain this type of character for the entire novel. I've found that what usually occurs is that most novels that tend to strike a nerve in me do so about halfway through, and the complaints are usually minor but nonetheless irritating. Turns of phrase that seem way out of character appear for seemingly no reason. Dialogue that's praised by one review as showing Ford's "extraordinary ear" seems stilted and absurd in points. And finally, a character who showed so much promise early in the novel turns out to be less than noble. His ability to effortlessly bed women while married strikes, what I assume is, both a jealous nerve and an enraged moral superiority complex.

I've never understood how writers of tremendous talent let phrases that are juvenile in nature intrude upon what is already established as being a particular way of thinking for a character. To put it another way, it seems incredibly out of character for words like "boink" and phrases like "drunk as a monkey" to be associated with a character who, like I said above, is already established as being much more sophisticated. Good writers, at least those who I really admire, don't allow this type of error to occur in their works. If a certain tone of writing is established then it stays that way until the end. As for this keen ear for dialogue that Ford is supposed to have, I myself rarely if ever feel the need to end every sentence of a conversation with the name of the person with whom I am speaking. Here's some examples from a single conversation between two characters:
"What are you thinking right now, Frank?"
"It didn't seem idiotic, Walter."
"I'm not putting babies in freezers, am I, Frank?"
"Do you think I've done harm, Frank?"
"I think it doesn't matter, Walter, to tell you the truth."
This conversation goes on for pages and pages. "Walter," "Frank," "Walter," "Frank." What the hell? Who talks like this? Also, who talks in a put on accent? Apparently plenty of people do so for entire conversations and this guy runs into all of them.

Finally, to the women. When they aren't baring their breasts to Frank and begging for an affair, as one character does, they're parading around the bedroom naked. For a character whose marriage crumbled from an affair that didn't happen, which was a refreshing change from the norm, these repeated escapades and flashbacks to previous ones more than make me hate this guy. When does it end? Again, is this real life? And why are these books all the same? John Irving's The World According to Garp may have been the first book to really piss me off in this vein. The men in these books are the aggressors who have some sort of sway over all women and dominate them both intellectually and physically. Apparently, nothing has changed over the years. I'm either incredibly out of the loop, overly sensitive, or jealous beyond belief at the physical prowess portrayed in these works. It's probably a little bit of all of them.