Review by New York Times Review
BANGETY, BANGETY, BANGETY, boop. That's how Frank Bascombe encapsulates the arc of his almost seven-decade life while examining his end of a conversation with a woman who's appeared, just before Christmas, at the front door of his home in Haddam, N.J. "I could've told her," he thinks, in response to a speck of autobiography she's divulged, that "I'd gone to Michigan, have two children, an ex-wife and a current one, that I'd sold real estate here and at the Shore for 20 years, once wrote a book, served in an undistinguished fashion in the Marines and was born in Mississippi - bangety, bangety, bangety, boop." This flip summary, of course, is the outline to one of the more essential stories in contemporary American fiction: Frank Bascombe's life and times, to which Richard Ford has devoted 1,352 pages spread over three previous volumes ("The Sportswriter," 1986; "Independence Day," 1995; and "The Lay of the Land," 2006). Droll, bemused, hyper-observant, occasionally exasperating and punctuated by sighs of both resignation and contentment (often at the same time), Bascombe's voice has offered a running commentary on the last four decades of, as he put it in "The Sportswriter," "the normal applauseless life of us all." If the trilogy of novels supplied the bangety bangety bangety, "Let Me Be Frank With You" provides the boop. It's a slim quartet of overlapping stories, all of them shadowed by the aftermath of the hurricane named Sandy that wrecked much of the Jersey Shore in 2012. Structurally and tonally, it has less of the dense plenitude of its forebears, and for this and other reasons it feels like an outlier in the Bascombe canon. (The subtitle - "A Frank Bascombe Book" - seems to make the same suggestion.) That Ford declared he was finished writing about Bascombe after "The Lay of the Land" should be immaterial here (John Updike considered himself done with Rabbit Angstrom after "Rabbit, Run," and just look how far Rabbit ran), though it nevertheless contributes to an impression of "Let Me Be Frank With You" as a kind of splendid half-measure, less a sequel than a status update - necessitated, perhaps, by what Sandy did to the New Jersey landscapes upon which Bascombe/Ford lavished so much penetrating and precise descriptive attention. Many of the familiar hallmarks, however, remain. The "Next Level" of life, which was the name Bascombe gave to his personal epoch toward the end of "The Lay of the Land," here gives way to the "Default Period" of life. Ford's prose retains its controlled tang, and despite its room-temperature tone can chill or warm a reader with startling immediacy. The trademark holiday setting this time around is Christmas, though it's a decidedly wan Christmas in post-Sandy New Jersey, and likewise for Bascombe, whose ambition to host a "festive family fly-in to ole San Antone" has been downgraded to a "not very appealing" solo trip to Kansas City to visit his son Paul As for Frank, he's 68 years old now, retired from the real estate business, still married to his second wife, Sally, and resettled back in Haddam, the same western New Jersey suburb where we first met him in "The Sportswriter." A "member of the clean-desk demographic," is how he describes himself, "freed to do unalloyed good in the world, should I choose to." Some of that chosen good includes greeting veterans returning from overseas combat and reading for the blind at a community radio station. Some of the less-chosen good he does, which furnishes the plots to these stories, includes driving down the Shore to counsel the man who bought Frank's now decimated former beach house in Sea-Clift; allowing a woman to revisit the house (which Frank now occupies) where, many years ago, her father killed her mother and brother before turning the gun on himself; delivering a "special, yoga-approved, form-fitted, densely foamed and molded orthopedic pillow" to his ex-wife, Ann, at the assisted-living facility where she's being treated for Parkinson's disease; and despite some grumbly resistance, agreeing to a reunion with an old member of the "Sportswriter"-era Divorced Men's Club who, stricken with pancreatic cancer, wants to issue a deathbed confession. As he did in "The Lay of the Land," Ford, via Bascombe, alludes to Henry James's contention that "relations end nowhere," an idea that's repeatedly borne out in these stories. "What can I get from her, after all? What can she get from me?" Bascombe thinks during his visit with Ann, 30 years after their divorce. "All we share is the click of reflex, a hammer falling on an empty chamber, like a desperado whose luck's run out." Except this isn't quite true: By reloading that chamber, the following story (the one containing the deathbed confession) adds firepower to James's notion. As Bascombe concludes, as he's leaving Ann's room, "Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts." Yet what James wrote immediately after "relations stop nowhere" is of equal interest here: "The exquisite problem of the artist is ... to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." Replace "geometry" with "geography" and you've got a fair précis of Richard Ford's vision. The contours of New Jersey - physical, but also sociological - have been central to the Bascombe saga. Not as a character, or fate, as in the Southern literary tradition from which the Mississippi-born Ford diverged, but as manifestations of the "lonely facts," as Ford wrote in "The Sportswriter," that Bascombe uses to ground himself. In "Let Me Be Frank With You," the landscape mirrors Bascombe's own subtracted existence. "I ask less of where I live than I used to," he admits, which is good, because, after Sandy, there's less of where he lives than there used to be. However wounded, the New Jersey we've come to know, from riding shotgun with Bascombe on interstates and back roads all these years, remains profoundly present and vibrantly distinct, no more an Anywhere, as the state's reputation mistakenly suggests, than Bascombe is an Everyman. It's no coincidence that the book Ford chose for Bascombe to be reading for the blind is "The Enigma of Arrival," V.S. Naipaul's gloomy rendering of a writer immersing himself in the landscape of rural England, a book propelled by what Salman Rushdie deemed a "sense that if the world is not described into existence in the most minute detail, then it won't be there." That same sense is what continues to propel Bascombe as he goes about his "personal fidget-'n'-drift along life's margins." An early scene in the first story finds Sally telling Frank, with "throat-clogging emotion," about a historical incident she's just read about. In 1862, she says, as 38 Sioux warriors were about to be hanged by the United States government, they all shouted, "I'm here!" "As if that made it all right for them," Sally tells him. "Made death tolerable and less awful. It gave them strength." Scrape away the heroism and the gallows clarity, and one realizes that's just what Frank Bascombe has been doing all these years: scrupulously mapping his interior and exterior landscapes as a way of announcing, "I'm here." As for what it means to be here, that's a subsidiary concern. "In my view," Frank says, "we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that." Frank Bascombe, retired and 68, is 'freed to do unalloyed good in the world.' JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels "Dear American Airlines" and "Want Not."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This cleverly titled set of four novellas narrated by Ford's signature character, Frank Bascombe, is caustically hilarious, warmly philosophical, and emotionally lush. After appearing in three novels The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006) Frank is 68, retired from selling real estate, contentedly married to his compassionate if brusque second wife, and wryly cognizant of the expected shackles and surprising liberations of age. But his tenuous equanimity is put to the test in the disorienting aftermath of Hurricane Sandy during intense and unforeseen encounters, each associated with a residence bristling with memories. Frank meets an old friend at the Jersey shore, where the storm destroyed the beach house Frank sold him. A woman who grew up in Frank's house returns to see it for the first time, revealing its horrific history. Frank dutifully visits his ex-wife in a state-of-the-art staged-care facility and makes another reluctant pilgrimage to see a dying friend in the hideously overdecorated mansion he sold him long ago. In each neatly linked tale, Frank ruminates misanthropically, wittily, and wisely about love, family, friendship, race, politics, and the mystery of the self. Can he truly be Frank with others? Can he be honest? LikeFrank, Ford, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence for Canada (2013), certainly is incisively frank, forensically observant, and covertly tender. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The word is out: Frank is back, and best-selling Ford will be touring the country backed by a muscular multimedia and online campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, continues to reflect on the meaning of existence in these four absorbing, funny, and often profound novellas. The collection is set in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2012. Frank considers the evanescence of life as he travels to the site of his former home on the shore; has an unsettling experience with a black woman whose family once lived in his present home in fictional Haddam; visits his prickly ex-wife, who is suffering from Parkinson's, in an extended-care institution; and meets a dying former friend. At 68, Frank feels "old"¿; his bout with prostate cancer has convinced him that he's in the "Default Period of life."¿ Intimations of mortality ("the bad closing in"¿) permeate his musings, recounted in an unadorned, profane, vernacular that conveys his witty, cynical voice. Frank's cranky comments and free-flowing meditations about current social and political events are slyly juxtaposed with references to Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Trollope, Emerson, Milton, and others. Despite Frank's dyspeptic outlook, Ford packs in a surprising amount of affirmation and redemption. Readers who met Frank in Ford's earlier novels will quickly reconnect with his indelible personality. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Ford returns to his best-known character, Frank Bascombe, first introduced in The Sportswriter, in four linked novellas that explore the state of Frank's life and that of the larger world in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Set on the Jersey Shore just before Christmas 2012, these stories find Frank, now 68 and retired from the real estate business, ruminating on age, loss, and the sense of decline he feels in himself and in the world. "I'm Here," for instance, reflects on loss and resilience as Frank visits his former beach home, destroyed by the hurricane, in the company of its present owner. In "The New Normal," Frank brings a small gift (an orthopedic pillow) to his ex-wife, Ann, who is recently diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, at the continuing care facility in the town where she currently resides. The idea of a new, diminished normal pervades these deeply elegiac tales. Like John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, Frank is a barometer of his times, and the times, as Ford sees them, are not good-as if Hurricane Sandy had blown back the curtains of everyday life to reveal truths about the ravages of aging, social decline, and climate change. VERDICT A notable addition-and perhaps coda-to Ford's "Frank Bascombe" trilogy; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]-Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The novelist returns with his favorite protagonist for a coda that is both fitting and timely. Ford made his critical and popular breakthrough by introducing Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter (1986) and then continued his progression with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995) and the epic The Lay of the Land (2006). In comparison to the other volumes in what had been known as "The Bascombe Trilogy"and to Ford's most recent novel, the masterful Canada (2012)this is a short, formalistic work. Each of its four chapters could stand as a story on its own, featuring Frank's meditations on odd encounters with someone from his past, now that he has settled into the detachment of retirement from the real estate racket. "[W]hat I mostly want to do is nothing I don't want to do," he explains, though he somehow finds himself commiserating with the guy who bought his house, destroyed by the recent Hurricane Sandy; the wife who became his ex three decades ago; and a former friend who is on his deathbed. While President Barack Obama, the hurricane and the bursting of the real estate bubble provide narrative signposts, not much really happens with Frank, which suits Frank just fine. He finds himself facing the mortal inevitability by paring downridding himself of friends, complications, words that have become meaningless. As he says, "I'd say it's a simple, good-willed, fair-minded streamlining of life in anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller-coaster." Until then, what he experiences is "life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end." Over the course of his encounters, there are a couple of revelations that might disturb a man who felt more, but plot is secondary here to Frank's voice, which remains at a reflective remove from whatever others are experiencing.Another Bascombe novel would be a surprise, but so is thisa welcome one. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
