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A Sport And a Pastime. “Set in France in the early 1960s, the sad and tender story concerns the erotic affair of American middle-class college drop-out Philip Dean and young French girl, Anne-Marie, as witnessed by a self-consciously unreliable narrator. The unnamed narrator freely admits that much of his observation is in fact his own fantasy of the couple, and includes a number of sexually-explicit descriptions of their day-to-day existence as he imagines it.

The book is generally regarded by critics as a modern classic. In the New York “Times Book Review, novelist and critic Reynolds Price wrote, ‘Of living novelists, none has produced a novel I admire more than A Sport and a Pastime . . . it’s as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know.’ The critic and biographer Adam Begley, in the New York Times Magazine, called it ‘extraordinary . . . The book feels utterly true.'”