Bascombe in Winter
The latest of the Frank Bascombe novels turns explicitly to a question its predecessors have been considering for forty years.
Review by Jeff Reimer
Be Mine is the fifth-ish novel featuring Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford’s longtime happy-sad, clueless-contemplative, compassionate-indifferent narrator. The first is The Sportswriter (1986), followed by Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and the hilariously titled Let Me Be Frank with You (2014), which is more like four interconnected long stories. Each of these novels (with the exception of the last) takes place over the course of one holiday weekend: Easter, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and now Be Mine over a cold Minnesota Valentine’s Day. I hesitate to say Be Mine is Ford’s last Frank Bascombe book, because I have confidently assumed each of the last three to be Ford’s last Frank Bascombe book. Because Ford has said so each time! So, while Be Mine has a sense of finality to it, it’s become clear that Ford is an unreliable narrator of his own intentions. (Not that I mind.) As a result, we’ve had the pleasure of watching Bascombe start at the cusp of middle age (The Sportswriter takes place when he is thirty-eight) and move through the second half of life.
Anyone who’s read over fifteen hundred pages of Bascombe’s ruminations will almost surely, out of obligation or affection or both, read Be Mine as well. And virtually nobody will start there. So anything more than a highly compressed summary seems superfluous. In short, Bascombe’s one remaining son (his first died prior to the opening of The Sportswriter), Paul, who is now forty-seven, is dying of ALS, and Bascombe has, for now, insisted on being his caretaker. We find them in Rochester, Minnesota, at the Mayo Clinic, where Paul is taking part in an “experimental drug study.” After, the plan is to take one last father-son trip, to Mount Rushmore, in a rented RV called “The Windbreaker”—a name Frank knows Paul, who has an overdeveloped sense of irony (or an underdeveloped sense of maturity), will find amusing.
Paul is, in fact, a bit of a weirdo. In a way, he has failed to thrive as an adult. His relationship with Frank, like so many American father-son relationships, is strained by grief, divorce, and a shared but alienating sense of protective irony. Theirs has been a series of missed connections across the years (Independence Day revolves around an elaborate and ultimately failed attempt at connection), an out-of-sync pattern wavelength repeated in miniature over the few days in which Be Mine takes place. Each man, knowing time is short but unsure how to approach the unfamiliar territory of sincerity, seems ready by turns to express or to receive some heartfelt father-son affirmation, but whenever one gets close, the other typically ends up angry or tired or distracted. Each time they miss, the stakes are raised for the next attempt.
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Paul eventually dies of ALS, and without giving much more away, suffice it to say that the pattern wavelength does manage to align, one last time—at Mount Rushmore, a place of such sincere, overweening patriotism that the incurably ironic Paul Bascombe turns out to be just the right interpreter of the experience. It is one of the most muted and unsentimental but sublimely moving passages in the entire Frank Bascombe oeuvre. This scene provides an appropriate sort of bookend to the series: near the beginning of The Sportswriter, when Paul is just eight years old, father and son bond in their shared grief over the death of Paul’s older brother, Ralph. It’s possibly the last time they will do so until the end of Be Mine, forty years later.
It seems that in Frank Bascombe, Ford found the voice of a generation, and he has put more and more of his energies into chronicling what has become an emblematic American life.
What does Frank Bascombe—the man, the character, the symbol—mean? He is a man, most importantly, who has spent his life assimilating both the tragic and the comic aspects of reality with an upbeat, determinedly unflappable equanimity. The Sportswriter feels like an existentially loaded novel, because we watch Bascombe take extreme pains to ensure that equanimity remains in place, even when it seems the least sane possible response. That existential tension drains out of Bascombe’s life as the subsequent books unfold. It seems the longer Ford wrote Frank Bascombe, the less his story was about finding meaning and purpose in the midst of a dimly cognizable despair. Instead, it became more about Frank Bascombe, the avatar par excellence of the American experience. So occasionally, it feels like Ford is stuffing Bascombe into some representative American situation rather than bringing the weight of significance to bear on his protagonist. But in other ways, the leeching of existential consequence seems just right, and there’s no other way to communicate that than fifteen hundred pages of first-person reflection: the series of compromises Bascombe makes in his thirties and forties becomes the stuff of middle age, then retirement, then old age. Angst is traded for stability. And who wouldn’t make that trade? Maybe the later books are less satisfying, but isn’t that just life? The potential gives way to the actual—the availability of any number of paths becomes the one we have taken.
In Be Mine, Bascombe says, “Why do we not do things? It’s a far richer question than why we do.” In a way, this is the question Ford has been asking throughout the Bascombe novels. The difference is that, while it was implied in The Sportswriter (where Bascombe is not doing all kinds of important things, and it’s wreaking havoc on his life), he’s now asking it explicitly. The opening passage of Be Mine finds Bascombe reflecting on his latent Presbyterianism, John Knox, Augustine, and happiness. As usual, he couches his insights in corny clichés and cutting asides. But just because Bascombe is only intermittently willing to interrogate the deep places in his life doesn’t mean Ford isn’t persistently interested in them. The opening and closing chapters are both titled “Happiness”—the only two with titles at all. Bascombe keeps bringing up Heidegger, only to dismiss him. Something more is going on. Richard Ford would have us pay attention to it, even when Frank Bascombe doesn’t.
Where does Be Mine leave Richard Ford in the tradition of American literature? The Sportswriter is probably the best-regarded Bascombe book, though Independence Day is, for my money, where Ford hit his stride. It’s also the one that consolidated Ford’s reputation as a latter-day Updike or Cheever: the book famously won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen-Faulkner Award, a turn of events that seemed to eventuate in two Richard Fords. There’s the Richard Ford of the “dirty realism” school of fiction writing, who is revered by critics, regularly mentioned alongside Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, and anthologized often. This is the Ford of Wildlife and Rock Springs (and now Canada), books of spare, tightly wound prose set in the American west and that feature hardscrabble, working-class protagonists in dire straits. Then there’s the Richard Ford of the Bascombe books, long novels set in affluent East Coast suburbs, whose plots are propelled by Bascombe’s soaring reflections on the American condition through the lens of real estate, his bilious sentences floating through the holiday haze of Haddam, New Jersey (Bascombe’s chosen hometown), which becomes a microcosm for a certain prosperous slice of postwar America. It seems that in Frank Bascombe, Ford found the voice of a generation, and he has put more and more of his energies into chronicling what has become an emblematic American life. This is the Richard Ford who wins major literary awards, but whom critics seem to have become less enamored of over the years. Be Mine won’t resolve any debates about Ford’s literary status in the pantheon of American novelists. But for those of us who have spent long years tooling around New Jersey with Bascombe as he has desperately tried to connect with his kids while negotiating doomed romantic liaisons, prickly prospective home buyers, and arch ex-wives, it doesn’t matter. Frank Bascombe is a voice and a character I love, and whatever he has to say while he makes his way through the world, I’ll be there along for the ride.
Jeff Reimer is an editor for Comment magazine.
Be Mine was published by Ecco on June 13, 2023. You can purchase a copy from the publisher here.
