Be Mine

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Very probably the last of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe books, and a return to the form seen in "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day," "Be Mine" happens on Valentine's Day, and 74 year old Frank is taking his 47 year old son, who has ALS (always fatal), on a road trip to visit, among other things, Mt. Rushmore. Other than my genius?” he laughs. “I think it’s probably because of something I admire myself in books that comes from a line of Henry James. ‘No themes are so human as those that reflect out of the confusion of life, the relationship between bliss and bile.’ I think the people who do like the books like them because they’re funny, and they’re funny about really grave things. There’s the old Borscht Belt comedian line: if nothing’s funny, nothing’s serious.” Death is very much on the mind of the 74-year-old narrator of this curtain call of a novel. But not primarily his own. His one surviving son, Paul, has contracted ALS (or “Al’s,” as they personify it), and Frank is shepherding him through what both know will be his final days—first at the Mayo Clinic in wintry, frigid Rochester, Minnesota, and then on a pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore. It’s a trip that both men find senseless and absurd, but you have to fill a life somehow, even if it’s about to end. Paul has neither forgotten nor forgiven his parents' split, their marriage doomed after the death of his brother. Now Paul’s mother (Frank’s first ex-wife) is dead as well. Frank seems adrift, but then he always has. He’s a reflective man but not a particularly deep thinker, more reactive to the vagaries of life than purposeful at determining any particular goal, direction, or meaning. But death—his first wife’s, his son’s, and eventually his own—gives him a lot to ponder about the meaning of it all, if there is any, and causes him to reflect on the life he has lived through the previous novels. One needn’t have read those to appreciate this, but it could well inspire readers to revisit the entire fictional cycle, launched to great acclaim with The Sportswriter (1986). As its title alludes, the new novel focuses on Valentine’s Day, as much as Independence Day (1995) did on that holiday: It’s a novel about the ambiguities of love and happiness. Frank remains a funny guy, both ha-ha funny and a little odd, but Ford couldn’t be more serious about his craft, his precision, his attention to detail, his need to say exactly what he means. Resolutely uncynical, blessed with the perceptual gifts of his creator, Frank Bascombe incarnates an old idea of America, now waning; and he knows it. The Mount Rushmore presidents, finally reached, have something “decidedly measly about them […] the great men themselves seem unapologetically apart, as if they’ve seen me, and I’m too small.” If that seems a bit on the nose, well, neither Frank Bascombe nor Richard Ford have ever shied away from the obvious – the obvious being, like everything else, part of the job.

Richard Ford: ‘I just make up shit to worry about at 3am’

What is Ford reading now for pleasure? “Well I’m reading Fintan [O’Toole]’s book [ We Don’t Know Ourselves] for one thing. Which is immersive and wonderful. And very useful for a non-Irish reader, oh boy. And I’m just about to read Michael Magee’s debut novel [ Close to Home]. My wife’s read it. I couldn’t get it out of her hands.” Apt reading, as he tells me he will be in Ireland next month. A road trip novel between a father and son. The son has motor neuron disease and has been enrolled in a medical study - having ‘graduated’ from the study they decide to go to Mount Rushmore. I wrote this book through the worst of the pandemic, and it was a big tincture of melancholy of not using my life fully enoughIn this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimedliving writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.

Richard Ford: ‘Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn Richard Ford: ‘Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn

In case we, like Hoffman, miss the point, Be Mine, the fifth and (I don’t think it really spoils anything to say) final Bascombe book, begins with a prologue entitled Happiness. Frank, “b 1945”, is “approaching my stipulated biblical allotment”. In this overture, he attends his high-school reunion, where he meets Pug Minokur, once the class basketball champ. Pug now has dementia and remembers nothing. “I’m really happy,” Pug says, before being led away by his grandson. Frank, our protagonist is now 74, mostly retired. He was a sportswriter before doing real estate. He now is into observing the human condition. Frank’s grown son, Paul has A.L.S., (Lou Gehrig’s disease), and time is short. Once again, Richard Ford has taken a slice of life that we all have or will have served to us at one time or another and finds the authentic pathos. It's been a while since I read the four previous works by Ford featuring and following Frank Bascombe through family and marriages and divorces and emotions, holidays, yearnings, America and more. I can't say I remember them particularly well, but I recall falling into each happily, reading them with great focus, and have each on my bookshelves. Having read this one, which may or may not be the final installment in Bascombe's world, I might very well make it a project to read them all again from the beginning. In Be Mine, Frank is now 74, working in real estate part-time, mostly a desk job, living alone, when he learns from his daughter that his son, Paul, with whom he's had an uneven relationship, has ALS. A road trip, as the other novels include, is featured here, once Paul has gone through an experimental drug program at Mayo. This is not laugh out loud funny, but the views are amusing, droll, the nature of America precise, the relationship between father and son true, and it was a pleasure to take this latest trip with Frank.Some of the secondary storylines seemed to cut out abruptly but I want to believe it's just part of Frank's rather unpredictable, choppy life.

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Waterstones

As well as Frank and his son, Be Mine also features the return of minor characters beloved of Ford’s readers, such as Mike Mahoney, a Tibetan-American who changed his name to “something more Irish”. Well, John was a great writer and I adored him, and I would never be in the same sentence as him, but maybe that’s averring that size matters.” He laughs. “But he knew that I was writing a series of books that were connected. And he talked to me as a colleague. He never said ‘These are great books’. Or ‘I know you wouldn’t have written these books if I hadn’t written the Rabbit books’. We just talked. But I’m happy to say that if it hadn’t been for Updike, I probably would never have had the temerity to think that I could write connected books.” Earlier in the novel, Frank details a relationship he has with Betty, a Vietnamese American massage therapist who he considers marrying and who may or may not seriously consider him as anything more than a reliable client. This may have some point in a five-novel portrait of Frank Bascombe, but in a stand-alone story it really serves little purpose. What about happiness? The book opens and closes with Frank’s reflections on happiness. Does Ford agree with the research that says that, after a dip in midlife, happiness rises again as we enter old age? But,” he continues, “I’m mostly caught up in the dearth of imagination among the Democrats for not having the gumption to quietly escort President Biden off the stage. It’s just horrible. And he’s got them all convinced that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Trump. Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn old to be president. He’s not too damn old to be writing a novel ... ”

This is the most poignant and touching of the Bascombe novels. Frank is an asshole, but is more humble and selfless, less selfish, than in the past. His old age feels like a terminal illness and he’s beginning to suffer from “global amnesia”, which suggests dementia is on the way. Ford takes another snapshot of America in the days before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out; the novel finishes with “the long plague months” at the end of Paul’s life. There’s also an ever-present menace, which many Americans must feel: the possibility of a sniper hiding somewhere, just about to take them out. This is his 5th book centred on the character of Frank Bascombe. It is touching, heart wrenching, funny, awful, sad, never pitiful and also never cosy. Frank, for all his imperfections in affairs of the heart over the course of his life, is committed to showing up for his dying son, and given the limitations of what is available given the time of year and his sons precarious health, he creates a road trip as a form of a Valentine's gift. It’s now a somewhat soiled and tattered abundance, actually, hedged around with dangers. In the Comanche Mall, “as in many public places now – and for perfectly supportable reasons”, Frank feels that “someone from somewhere may be about to shoot me”. The RV rental place Frank visits is called A Fool’s Paradise. This, of course, is what America is. It is also what Frank has always knowingly tried to cultivate. As he says: “The ability to feel good when there’s almost no good to feel is a talent right up there with surviving loss.” The ironies here aren’t cynically deployed. A fool’s paradise may be the only paradise we get. Richard Ford talks to Alex Clark about his latest novel Be Mine. Ford has written about American life through his character Frank Bascombe for nearly forty years though The Sportswriter to Independence Day and Lay of the Land. This time Frank undertakes a road trip across the country with his son who is dying of ALS - a form of motor neurone disease – and their journey is both tender and tough, filled with wit. Ford discusses his writing, passion for observation and unerring faith in the US political institutions. Relations, the great master says, never really end. But it is the task of the teller to draw - by a geometry of his own - the circle within which they will, happily or otherwise, appear to do so.” (Richard Ford)

Be Mine (Frank Bascombe, book 5) by Richard Ford Be Mine (Frank Bascombe, book 5) by Richard Ford

At the end Frank has been living in the basement of his doctor friend. She has rebuffed any suggestion of a romantic relationship, let alone marriage which Frank sort of proposes, but he can stay and they have drinks together, often along with her current boyfriend. I had assumed that this one would end with Frank’s funeral, or at any rate, its planning (the novels are written in the first person). But it turns out that it isn’t Frank, by now in his 70s, who lies dying in Be Mine, but another of his sons, Paul, a troubled middle-aged man who, when the book begins, has been diagnosed with ALS, a form of motor neurone disease that is also known in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it. This book is set just before Covid appeared. Ford has an interesting way of showcasing his prose as readers follow Frank glimpsing a television screen…A literary project matched in ambition only by John Updike's Rabbit series … The greatest ambition of all is that Ford has decided to make this grim material into a bright comedy, and has succeeded' Now that Frank’s story has fattened into a sequence spanning four decades and five books, it is easier to perceive that Hoffman’s review may have missed The Sportswriter’s point (though shooting her book in retaliation still seems excessive). As you progress through The Sportswriter and its sequels – Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006) and the title novella in the collection Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) – it becomes clearer and clearer that these are, indeed, books about happiness as a project of conscious denial. Frank, in his own way, does what the alien Tralfamadorians tell Billy Pilgrim to do in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: he lives only in the happy moments. Blessed with the perceptual gifts of his creator, Frank incarnates an old idea of America, now waning; and he knows it