Independence Day's Frank Bascombe

Richard Ford's Independence Day remains the best novel I've read whose action takes place in and around an American holiday, and in the past few years, I've discovered that the fourth and fifth novels in the Frank Bascombe series are as equally compelling. The Sportswriter is possibly my least favorite of the five, although for years that was all there was to Frank. Without putting too much thought into it, I'd rank the five books from favorite to least favorite thusly: (1) Independence Day, (2) Be Mine, (3) The Lay of the Land, (4) Let Me Be Frank With You, and (5) The Sportswriter. I read them in the order in which the appeared, but it was years after the date of publication for all except Independence Day. Speaking of which, happy Fourth of July.

From Detroit

"From Detroit, when I told her semi-coherently what little I knew about Paul's situation, she seemed glad to hear from me, was completely ready to step in and seemed to know all that was required. She, for starters, wasn't satisfied with the evaluation at Cornell. ("Cursory at best. This is much too serious.") These first-rate specialists only trust their own--their own nurses, techs, phlebotomists, scanners, pipettes, blood pressure cuffs, etc. Medicine, in most ways, is not a science or an art, but a guildish freemasonry extending back to black mysteries and necromancy. I'm okay with it."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

The idea of choice

"The idea of choice in most things is of course a feathery lie of western philosophy. Selling houses lets you know it. There, humans regularly choose then unchoose, choose then regret choosing, choose then rechoose, resist choosing, then choose wrong and learn to like it. Choice usually isn't choice, only what you're left with."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

There is no was.

"She even quoted that scrofulous old faker [William] Faulkner . . . when she said, 'There is no was. There is only is.'"

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

the Old Oaken Slop-pot

"When I reached the Delta gate in Marquette—having stabilized to a fugue state of grief mixed with low-grade aspiration regarding timely questions relevant to what now for me, or what ever—the waiting area was a-thrive with activity. The Northern Michigan University Fighting Bull-Bats were a day away from playing the archrival, Wisconsin-Eau Claire Anvil Heads in a pigskin contest to decide the Peckerwood League Championship and who would bring home the Old Oaken Slop-pot and go on to the Clinker Bowl in Duluth on New Year's day, when the fate of the world would be decided."

~~ from Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford

the great American real-estate novel

Monkeybicycle fiction editor James Tate Hill joked on twitter about writing "the great real estate novel," and I tweeted back that one to two of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe novels fall into this category. . . and then within a week or two, I picked up my navy blue hardcover edition of Bright Lights, Medium-Sized City and learned that, in fact, this was the great real-estate novel of our time. Florida short sales, routine foreclosures, overbuilt subdivisions, leaking pipes, busted garage doors, and broken dreams are all invited to the party. Hill, Ford, and Jay McInerney can only dream of drinking the same I-4 7-11 colas as Orlando's Nathan Holic. A hundred pages in, I find BLM-SC to be a fun and informative page-turner with a creative hybrid model, mostly novel with some "choose your own adventure" and graphic elements. It's worth a look.

PS--You can buy five copies of this book for less than the average ticket to Disney World.

from The Lay of the Land

"I watch CNN every night, but never afterward think much about anything I see--even the election, as stupid as it is. I've come to loathe most sports, which I used to love--a loss I attribute to having seen the same thing over and over again too many times. Only death-row stories and sumo wrestling (narrated in Japanese) will keep me at the TV longer than ten minutes. My bedside table, as I've said, has novels and biographies I've read thirty pages into but can't tell you much about."

~~ Frank Bascombe from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, p.250