Be Mine by Richard Ford: A review

Here's Frank Bascombe come to take us on a road trip once again. Since his creator, Richard Ford, first introduced him to us almost forty years ago, Frank has taken us on several holiday trips, most notably in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day.

Once again, Frank is taking a road trip with his son Paul who is now 47 and suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease). Frank and Paul refer to it as Al's, like some neighborhood bar. Frank is in his 70s and dealing with all the problems that come with an aging body, while also trying to serve as caretaker to his son.

So, how exactly is Frank accomplishing that? Well, his latest idea is to hit the road with Paul and take him to Mount Rushmore on a Valentine's Day trip. Paul has been in an experimental protocol for treating ALS at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Frank collects him and they head west. 

The topics of conversation between the two men while traveling range from observations about the midwestern landscape they are traversing to matters of life and death itself. Frank's health has been problematic as well. He's recovered from prostate cancer and now he just wants to be happy "before the gray curtain comes down." 

There's a certain desperation to Frank's personality that has been less noticeable (at least to me) in the previous four books in this series. As his body grows older, weaker, and more uncomfortable to live in, he senses that time is running out for him as well as for his son. It's an awareness that many of us, especially those of us of a certain age, can easily relate to. I think Richard Ford, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, may perceive that awareness quite personally, too, and perhaps that is why he is able to write about it so feelingly.

Previous reviews in this series:

The Sportswriter

Independence Day

The Lay of the Land

Let Me Be Frank With You

Between Them by Richard Ford: A review

I don't usually read memoirs. Perhaps I have an unreasoning prejudice against them born of some reading experience in my distant past, but, generally, I just don't enjoy them. But I will always make an exception for Richard Ford.

Ford has written this short (less than 200 pages) memoir of his parents and of his experience growing up with them. It essentially consists of two long essays written some thirty years apart in time. 

Both were written after his parents' deaths. The one about his mother was written first, although she was the second one to die. The second one about his father was written many years after his father died in 1960. Ford was only sixteen years old at the time.

In the book itself, the essays appear in the order of the deaths, so the one about the father is first, followed by the one about the mother.

We learn that Richard was an only child and his arrival was a bit of a surprise for his parents. They had been married for fifteen years when he was born. Apparently, those fifteen years had been happy ones that his parents spent mostly on the road. His father was a traveling salesman for the Faultless Starch Company and his mother went with him as he made his rounds to a number of southern states in his territory.

Both his parents were from Arkansas and that remained their home base in their years of travel, but with the expectation of a baby arriving on the scene, they decided to make a move. His father's employer encouraged him to move to a more central location within his territory so that he would be able to spend more time at home. Thus it was that they decided to move to Jackson, Mississippi, a town where they knew virtually no one. It was there that their son was born and where he spent the formative years of his life.

I've always felt a connection with Ford because of where he was born and grew up, for I was growing up in that area during much the same period, the '50s and '60s. Our family situations were quite different. My family were farmers and factory workers. His father was the aforementioned traveling salesman and his mother, after Richard's birth, was a stay-at-home mom. But we were both only children and we both grew up as observers, witnessing first our own families and then the larger society. And we both got out when we could.

This memoir seems to be Ford's attempt to give his witness of the lives of two ordinary, unremarkable people and perhaps to fix in his own mind his memories of them. Maybe it is his acknowledgement, too, that he wouldn't be the man he is, seventy-two years on, had it not been for them and his experiences as their son. Of course, the truth is he wouldn't be, period, had it not been for them.  

A child never really experiences what life is like for his/her parents. How indeed can we ever truly understand the inner lives of even the people closest to us? The borders of their minds are closed to us. But Richard Ford, the observer, has put together his memories of actual events with his imagination and supposition of what his parents' lives must have been like, how they responded to events, what they felt. In doing so, he has given us an affectionate, insightful, and altogether tender portrait of two white people born in the South in the early part of the 20th century; two ordinary people who never made headlines or were noticed by the world outside their own circle of friends and family. And yet they managed to produce one extraordinary writer.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars     

Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford: A review

Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts."
- Frank Bascombe's meditation upon visiting his ex-wife

We thought we'd heard the last of Frank Bascombe in The Lay of the Land, published in 2006 and the last in what was billed as the "Frank Bascombe trilogy." But it turns out that Frank wasn't finished with us, or, perhaps more accurately, Richard Ford wasn't finished with Frank. And so we get a fourth Frank Bascombe book. Lucky us.

Each of the three previous books were focused on a particular holiday and this one continues that tradition. This time we are in 2012. Hurricane Sandy has hit and devastated the East Coast, including Frank's New Jersey. We are now several weeks past that tragedy and coming up on Christmas. It's a Christmas that Frank had hoped to host as a "festive family fly-in to ole San Antone" where he looked forward to visiting the Alamo and the River Walk and later heading out to see the LBJ sites. But it was not to be. Now, he can only look forward to a solo Christmas trip to Kansas City to visit his son Paul - not a particularly appealing prospect.

As we meet Frank this time, he is 68 years old and retired from the real estate business. Both that career and his earlier one as a sportswriter are well into his past now. He is still married to his second wife, Sally. In addition to his son, he has his daughter who is a veterinarian in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the mother of his children, his first wife Ann, who is in what Frank refers to as a "high-end old folks home" nearby, where she is being treated for Parkinson's disease.

Let Me Be Frank with You is structured as Frank's meditation on his life as he nears the end of his seventh decade. It is entirely in his voice and Frank's voice is acute, sometimes cynical, and often (to me) laugh-out-loud funny. (I do appreciate Ford's humor. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we come from the same place.)

The book comprises four novellas or extra-long short stories. They all take place in the days leading up to Christmas in the weeks after Sandy and they all feature a character who wants something from Frank.

"I'm Here" features Arnie Urquhart, who, years before, had bought Frank's house on the Jersey shore. That house was upended and destroyed by the hurricane. Now, Arnie insists that Frank come and see it. He needs him to bear witness and to give him his advice.

"The New Normal" finds Frank visiting Ann in her "old folks' home" to deliver a special pillow that she wanted. Once again, this couple who shared so much, including the death of a son, contemplate the failure of their marriage.

In "Everything Could Be Worse," a well-dressed, middle-aged black woman comes to Frank's home in Haddam, New Jersey, and asks if she can see the house. She explains that she grew up there. He invites her in and eventually she tells him the sad and tragic story of her family that occurred in that house.

Finally, in "Deaths of Others," Frank gets a call - several calls, actually - from an old acquaintance, Eddie, who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Eddie asks Frank to visit him and, most reluctantly, he finally does. It turns out that Eddie needed to see him in order to make a shocking deathbed confession.

I enjoyed this book from the first page to the last. One of the things that I found most appealing and which made me empathize with Frank/Richard Ford was that much of his meditation on this stage of his life was in the form of a complaint about the sad decline of the language, something which I, too, find appalling. One of Frank's examples of this is the constant use of the word "awesome" to describe things that are barely mediocre. (Yes, it's one of my many pet peeves!)

Frank Bascombe is one of the most memorable characters in contemporary American literature. He is funny, profane, often politically incorrect, and an acute observer of American life. I wonder if we've now heard the last of him. Or perhaps in another ten years we'll meet him again as he enters his ninth decade. I, for one, look forward to that meeting.

View all my reviews

*~*~*~*

ADDENDUM: Here are links to my reviews of books in the Frank Bascombe trilogy in their order of publication:

The Sportswriter

Independence Day 

The Lay of the Land

Canada by Richard Ford: A review

Dell Parsons, a 66-year-old soon-to-be-retired high school English teacher in Canada, looks back at his life and tells its story. In particular, he tells of the two defining and cataclysmic events that happened when he was fifteen and that set him on the road to his life that would become.

Parsons' voice is a flat, laconic, stream-of-consciousness type story-telling that is deceptively simple. You read a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and think, "Huh, not much there." Then you read on and suddenly it grabs you and you begin to see the significance of that bland sentence pages back and just how it fits into a whole that is greater than its parts. This is the work of a writer who knows what he is doing, who is, in short, a master of his craft.

The first paragraph of Richard Ford's book, Dell Parsons' story, is a hook.

First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister's lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

How could you not continue reading after that?

Dell Parsons and his twin (slightly older) sister Berner were Air Force brats. Their father, an Alabama native, was a career Air Force man who had been a bombardier in World War II. Their mother, the daughter of Jewish immigrants in Seattle, became pregnant after a brief relationship with Bev Parsons and the two immediately got married. Thus were their lives changed forever and diverted into streams where they would not otherwise have flowed.

The twins were born and with their parents moved around to various Air Force bases around the country, finally winding up in Great Falls, Montana where their father retired from his military career, after a bit of a dust-up about illegally obtained beef for the officers' dining tables. Because of their constant moves, Dell and Berner never really felt at home anywhere. They were always the outsiders, but they always had each other.

Then their father got it into his head that the best way forward for his family was for him to rob a bank. He convinced his wife to be a part of the scheme and they headed off to North Dakota to implement their "plan." They returned home with their loot of $2500 and were captured almost immediately. The fifteen-year-old twins were left on their own.

Berner, who was the wild one of the duo, ran away to San Francisco. But Dell, ever the obedient son, stayed put as his mother had told him to and eventually her friend, Mildred, came to collect him. 

Mildred heads north with the boy. She intends to deliver him to her brother Arthur in Saskatchewan and so she does. In the course of a few months, Dell's life is uprooted and then changed forever as he learns to work and survive in an alien environment and he witnesses things and is a part of things that will stay with him for the rest of his life.

Dell's life story is one of redemption. It could have so easily gone so wrong and yet it doesn't. 

The intervention of a kindly woman puts him on a bus to Winnipeg where he will live with the woman's son and go to school. Eventually, he marries a Canadian woman, becomes a Canadian citizen himself, and makes a good middle-class successful life for himself. But he remembers everything about how he got there.

Richard Ford is a fine writer. I greatly enjoyed his three highly acclaimed Frank Bascombe novels and I looked forward to reading this latest from him. I was not disappointed.

A good interview piques my interest

One of the great joys of my life as a reader is discovering a wonderful writer that I had not read before. That's happened to me several times within the last year, and one of my favorite discoveries was Richard Ford. It's not that I was unaware of Mr. Ford, who has been a superstar in the American firmament of writers for many years now. But I had just never gotten around to reading him.

Finally, last year, I read his Frank Bascombe trilogy: The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. From the first pages of The Sportswriter, it was clearly evident to me what all the shouting was about. The man can write! He has a love of language and of finding just the right word for expressing what he wants to say that shines through in every sentence. It was also clear to see why the second book in the series, Independence Day, had won all those prizes. It is still the only book ever to have won both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner awards.

For a couple of weeks now, I've been reading about Ford's new book, Canada. It has gotten very positive reviews and it looks like it will be another success for him. I had been thinking that I need to put it on my "To be read" list. I was delighted, then, to learn that the writer would be interviewed about his new book this morning on the Diane Rehm Show and I settled down to listen. (You, too, can listen to the interview here.)

The first thing that I noticed about Ford was the Mississippi in his voice. He has a very slight accent that sounded like home to me. Moreover, he is a wonderful storyteller, orally as well as in writing, and Rehm is a skilled interviewer. It made for a very entertaining hour.

Ford talked a little about his childhood in Jackson. He grew up on the same street where Eudora Welty lived and he went to the same elementary school that she had attended. In fact, in spite of the fact that there was 35 years difference in their ages, they had had one of the same teachers! With influences like that, how could he not grow up to be a writer?

His new book follows the story of a 15-year-old boy whose family is ruptured by a crazy and criminal act by his parents. The boy winds up in Canada - thus the name of the book - where he finally manages to make a good and decent life for himself. The book follows him through that life. Ford read a couple of passages from the book during the interview. The language was luminous.

Listening to Rehm and Ford talk for this hour, I realized that my first instinct had been correct. Canada goes on my TBR list today!

The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford: A review

This is the final of Richard Ford's three books featuring his character, Frank Bascombe. In the first book, The Sportswriter, the action took place around Easter, and I found Bascombe to be a not very appealing character. In the second book, Independence Day, the action revolved around that eponymous holiday, and I began to understand and have a bit of fellow feeling for the main character. Finally, in this book, my conclusion is that Frank Bascombe, like most of us perhaps, is as good a person as he can be and that he strives to be a good person and to live a moral life. With all his weaknesses and failures (with which I can perfectly empathize!), Bascombe seems a person worthy of our sympathies and his life has some positive lessons for the reader.

We meet Frank here at a crisis in his life. His second wife has left him when her first husband, who was thought to be dead, turned up alive, and she felt that she must return to him. His two children are grown up and launched on their own lives, although not the lives that he would necessarily have wished for them. His real estate business is going great. He's been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has gone to the Mayo Clinic, accompanied by his daughter, to be treated. The treatment seems to be going well. He believes he has come to terms with his condition. He also believes that he has finally accepted the death of his son Ralph at age nine, some two decades earlier. The time is Thanksgiving 2000 and the country is in turmoil as the outcome of the presidential election remains in doubt. Frank, a Democrat, believes he knows how it will all turn out - not happily, for him or the country.

Richard Ford is an amazingly talented and accomplished writer. His characters are so sharply and exquisitely drawn that we feel we know them intimately. They are our neighbors, our sisters, our cranky relatives, ourselves. His dialogues are true to the way people talk. His descriptions of place leave us smelling the very air and feeling the oppressive heat or the icy winds of those vistas. Plus he has a way of tossing out these one or two sentences of philosophical observations ("You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him sing opera!") that just crack me up. He writes with a sly humor that is enormously appealing.

My trip through the life and times of Frank Bascombe has been an enjoyable and enlightening one. Now that it is over, I shall miss him.

Independence Day by Richard Ford: A review

Frank Bascombe is no longer The Sportswriter. Independence Day takes place about seven years past the events of that book. Frank and his wife, Ann, divorced in the aftermath of the stresses caused by the death of their first son. Ann subsequently remarried and moved to Connecticut with their remaining two children. Frank bought her old house in Haddam, New Jersey, and, in selling their former family home, leveraged for himself a career in residential real estate. It's a job that he likes and is good at. He has made some wise investments and some would say he is sitting pretty. 

But Frank hasn't been able to fully move on with his life. He has a girlfriend but can't completely commit to her because he still sees himself with Ann. Complicating matters is their 15-year-old son who seems to be experiencing an emotional and psychological crisis which threatens prospects for his future. On an Independence Day weekend, Frank plans to take his son on an excursion to the Basketball Hall of Fame and then on to Cooperstown for the Baseball Hall of Fame. He hopes to bond with him and impart his wisdom and set him on the right course in life. An ambitious agenda for one weekend. It is, of course, doomed to failure. Or, maybe, not quite. 

In The Sportswriter, I found Frank Bascombe to be a not very appealing character, but he improves on further acquaintance. Richard Ford has written him as a sort of quintessential American, an Everyman searching for meaning in his life, searching for The Meaning of Life, haunted by intimations of mortality, fearful about his children's futures, wondering how everything got so complicated and where his life went off track. He is, in short, a character with whom I and most readers of a certain age can identify and empathize. 

Ford is a very talented writer and in Frank Bascombe, he has created a character whom he obviously knows very well. Frank may not be autobiographical exactly, but Ford thoroughly understands the place he came from, the various detours his life has taken, and why he is confused about the course on which he seems to be headed. He understands and he makes the reader understand and want to know more about how it all works out. Good thing there is a third book in this series so maybe we'll get to find out!

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford: A review

My home state of Mississippi is one of the poorest in the country and is problematic in many ways, but one thing it has always been rich in is writing talent. Each generation in turn seems to produce at least one or two extraordinarily talented writers. Richard Ford is one of the ones from my generation.

For years, my husband had been trying to get me to read Ford's books and I finally decided that this would be the summer that I would read his Frank Bascombe series. The Sportswriter is the first in that trilogy.

Frank Bascombe is the sportswriter. He tried his hand at writing fiction but gave up after one book and took a job with a sports magazine. It's a job that seems to fit him. He likes the traveling. He likes talking to athletes. He likes meeting people who know how to be "within themselves." Frank doesn't really know how to be within himself but he aspires to learn.

The sportswriter is actually a very conventional, middle-aged, middle class white male with a wife and two children. He did have another child, but his oldest son has died a few years before. That tore his world apart and was the beginning of the end of his marriage. Now his ex-wife and children live separately and are making new lives for themselves and Frank has joined the Divorced Mens' Club and has found a new girlfriend, Vicki, who seems particularly annoying.

To be honest, Frank is pretty annoying himself. He's not really someone I would choose to spend a lot of time with and I got pretty tired of his rather complaining voice before the end of the book. But I think that was all a part of the exposition of the character. I'm not sure that he was meant to be a particularly sympathetic character. And yet one cannot help but feel a certain amount of sympathy for this sad sack of a man who seems to have no real clue of how to pull himself out of the funk he is in.

I got the impression that Ford was very, very familiar with Frank's story, that although it may not be strictly biographical, some aspects of it were rather closely based on Ford's own experiences. He tells the story in a very straightforward manner with no bells and whistles. He just lays it all out, even the uglier parts and leaves the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

I think it will be interesting to see how Frank Bascombe develops over the course of the trilogy. One hopes that he might become a little more appealing as we come to understand him better. Or perhaps he'll be more like Rabbit of John Updike's award-winning series - a character who never became especially likable but was mesmerizing nevertheless.