{"id":3731,"date":"2023-06-22T09:05:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-22T09:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3731"},"modified":"2023-07-10T09:15:22","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T09:15:22","slug":"lifes-shuddering-advances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3731","title":{"rendered":"Life’s shuddering advances"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Be Mine by Richard Ford for the Times, 22 June 2023<\/a><\/p>\n

Move up there: Richard Ford is back again, and once again he\u2019s got Frank with him, his wayward alter-ego.<\/p>\n

Since this is Ford\u2019s fifth exploration of the consciousness of sportswriter-turned-realtor Frank Bascombe, here\u2019s a summary. (You don\u2019t strictly need it; it\u2019s not that sort of a series. But there\u2019s no harm in being orientated.) As a young man in the late 1970s, Frank nursed big dreams. In time he learned to pack them away. He got married, had children, and watched one of them die \u2014 an event that, not too surprisingly, spelled the end of his relationship. He married again, not very successfully. He\u2019s retired now and wedged comfortably, if bemusedly, in America\u2019s post-retail uncanny, where nothing has any obvious relation to anything else — \u201cThe gravestone company that sells septics, the pet supply that offers burials at sea, the shoe store that sells baseball tickets\u201d.<\/p>\n

Frank Bascombe is an ordinary man, and this is the fifth instalment of his ordinary life.<\/p>\n

Ford\u2019s keenly observing, wise-cracking alter ego, seems on the face of it to be an unlikely focus for over three decades of dedicated effort. Frank has spent most of his life selling real estate. Before that he was a sports writer. He wanted to be the next Raymond Carver, once upon a time, but in his late thirties he decided to get a real job.<\/p>\n

This is where Ford and Bascombe parted ways. Ford, too, once tried to get a real job \u2014 but wasn\u2019t nearly as savvy as his alter-ego, and couldn\u2019t make a dime outside of becoming a literary giant and our pre-eminent proponent of American realism.<\/p>\n

Frank remembers reading that in good novels, \u201canything can follow anything<\/em>, and nothing ever necessarily follows anything else<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is simply Ford removing the safety-net before embarking on his latest high-wire act. Of course there\u2019s a plot. I\u2019d go so far as to say that there\u2019s a hero\u2019s journey here, as Frank arranges one last trip for himself and his surviving son Paul, a long, flat, boring drive across South Dakota to Wyoming, and Rapid City, and — of all places — Mount Rushmore, \u201cmost notional of national monuments, and thus most American\u201d.<\/p>\n

Paul has been diagnosed with ALS, a neuro-degenerative condition that is uncoupling his muscles from his brain in something like real time as we read.<\/p>\n

Our privileged access to the cockpit of Frank\u2019s head comes at significant emotional cost. There\u2019s no fire exit for us here — no chill-out space scattered with comfy abstractions, opinions or Fine Writing. We\u2019re in for the long haul — Hartford, South Dakota — Mitchell, South Dakota —<\/p>\n

Ford being Ford, of course, it all goes like the clappers, leaving us teary and exhilarated (reading Ford is really like getting laid).<\/p>\n

For four volumes now, Frank has been learning to navigate the downpour of disconnected stuff that makes up his ordinary life (much of it in New Jersey), stringing eventoids together in ways that will carry meaning. This necessity, to turn one\u2019s own life into a story and remain halfway sane thereby, hit 38-year-old Frank with the power of revelation back when he first appeared, in The Sportswriter, back in 1986.<\/p>\n

Now he\u2019s in his seventies, and knows what he\u2019s about, dogged in his pursuit of meaning in a life that (as is usual) happens to him while he is making other plans. (\u201cWhy do we not do things?\u201d Frank wonders. \u201cIt is a far richer question than why we do<\/em>.\u201d) Here is a master at work. And I don\u2019t mean Ford (who needs no whoop-hooooorahs from me); I mean Frank.<\/p>\n

This is the adventure of a man desperately trying to make life as least like an adventure as possible for his balding, warty, forty-seven year-old son, an oddball for whom \u201cconnections between the heartfelt and the preposterous are his yin and yang\u201d, and dying, as we watch, from a disease people regularly kill themselves to avoid. \u201cShort of joining the Zion Lutherans, setting out nasturtiums and registering to vote,\u201d Frank explains, \u201cI’ve done all I can to solidify an idea of normal life for us, so we’re not constantly peeking around the sides of things to confront life’s shuddering advances.\u201d<\/p>\n

But is Frank\u2019s everything enough? Frank knows he\u2019s weak, and distractible and, who\u2019s to say? a little bit empty inside. His son certainly says so — but then, his son only ever talks in one-liners (absurd, barbed, both); they\u2019re his strategy for eluding experience. His daughter Clarissa knows so — but that\u2019s her trouble: she thinks that people are knowable, and opinions suffice. She\u2019s the sort of reader who would give up on Be Mine, complaining that there\u2019s no plot.<\/p>\n

So what happens? What gives?<\/p>\n

Frank and his son spend chapters preparing to visit the Mayo Clinic in Rochester where Paul, a volunteer and \u201cmedical pioneer\u201d, is being \u201ccelebrated\u201d at the conclusion of a research study. At the last minute, half-way down \u201cdeath\u2019s bright companionway\u201d and twenty feet from the door, father and son peel away and go instead to pick up their camper van.<\/p>\n

Half way through the book, they\u2019re ready to leave Rochester.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a chapter in a Hilton Garden.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a chapter in The World\u2019s Only Corn Palace (I\u2019ve been there; Ford nails it).<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a chapter about choosing a near-derelict motel over the Fawning Buffalo Casino, Golf and Deluxe Convention Hotel near Wall, South Dakota.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s here, just a few pages before Rushmore, that Ford tips his hand.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018I know we have to do what we have to do,\u2019\u201d says Patti, the motel owner; like most strangers met along this road, she\u2019s sympathetic enough. \u201c\u2018But we don’t always have to do the precise right thing for the precise right reasons all the time. Okay, Frank?\u2019 She pyramids her dark eyebrows as if she’s imparting sacred truths anybody\u2019d be crazy to ignore.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Frank, his shoulder screaming from the effort of lifting his crippled son into their van, takes one look down that primrose path and decides he\u2019s sure as hell not going there: \u201cAnd of course she\u2019s wrong! Dead wrong! Should I not care that I\u2019m doing what I\u2019m doing and why? Or how I\u2019m doing it? With my only son? Is that ever true?\u201d<\/p>\n

Good stories have cracking plots about heroes who must face impossible odds and make great sacrifices. Frank does this each time he orders breakfast. Frank holds himself together the way you and I hold ourselves together (or try to) — by snatching at straws in the maelstrom of everyday life (whatever the hell that is).<\/p>\n

And Be Mine is Frank — a 20-foot model of the Titanic assembled from matchsticks.<\/p>\n

Or picture this (since that matchstick Titanic might inspire admiration, but never love): picture a novel that feels truer to experience than your own experience.<\/p>\n

Or this (since we\u2019re none of us getting any younger, and this is likely Frank\u2019s swan-song): the chance to spend a last few hours with a friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Be Mine by Richard Ford for the Times, 22 June 2023 Move up there: Richard Ford is back again, and once again he\u2019s got Frank with him, his wayward alter-ego. Since this is Ford\u2019s fifth exploration of the consciousness … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[236,1095,1094,783],"class_list":["post-3731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-novel","tag-realism","tag-series","tag-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3733,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731\/revisions\/3733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}