Be Mine

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I assume when I’m in Walgreens [the chemist] – and unfortunately, at my age, I often am in Walgreens – that 50% of people there are carrying. The reason they are doing this, ostensibly, is in case some malefactor tries to shoot them. But it’s blurry because I can tell you that when you walk around carrying a firearm, you look at everybody as a potential target. You’re basically thinking subliminally about the possibility that you will shoot. Frank drives Paul out to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he will be analyzed and studied, not cured. Paul’s condition is rapidly deteriorating, and Frank finds himself in the role of caretaker, assisting his son increasingly more often in performing his basic functions. The two men are constantly sparring with one another, with a sarcasm and gallows humor both witty and morbid. In Be Mine, Bascombe reveals a continuing desire for life, even in the face of his terrible loss: “It’s not cold-hearted or mechanical, but yes, his impulse, after his son dies, is to go on living, and it would probably be mine, too, after a while. Human beings are amazing, as amazing as the imagination will let them be. There’s no one way to cope with the death of a son and there’s no one way to live.” The fifth, last, and saddest of the Frank Bascombe books. As always, there is fine writing, smart observations of American life and culture, and sharp humor. But there's less humor than in the past, and most of it is bitter. The fact of Donald Trump’s election continues, even now, to seem preposterous to him. But Ford believes – or perhaps he only chooses to believe – that his presidency was an interregnum, not the start of a downward spiral. “The republic is fairly ebullient and I don’t think he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected again. Partly, he’s too old, just like Biden. Partly, he’s probably insane. I think it’s become glaringly obvious to everybody that he’s delusional.” So democracy will endure in the US? “I don’t know the answer to that, and I won’t be here anyway. But I will say that its survival is a whole lot less dependent on who the president is than it is on our position vis-a-vis our antagonists. The fact that we cannot stop this insane war in Ukraine. Americans are taking it as a given that we can’t stop it. And what’s happening with the Chinese. I don’t have much of an idea about that, but I know it’s nothing good. They’re not riven by doubts. They’re not riven by ethical conflicts. And I don’t think we’re in a position to do anything about them.”

The New Yorker Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

At the end of the book Frank is outside, contemplating his life, and a voice calls him. Maybe it's his hostess, maybe it's death. Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.Recently an advance copy of Mr. Ford’s new book, “Be Mine,” was available and I thought I would give it a shot. I felt I must have missed something, had the wrong attitude. At the same time, I had an extra Audible credit available, and I thought maybe a different format might be the thing to align me with his pacing. For his part, Ford intends to go on writing, but he’s also at peace with the possibility that whatever is in the tank, words-wise, may not “be anything”. How will he celebrate his big birthday next year? He smiles. “I am a man who generally asks my friends to just shut up and let me spend my birthday quietly. I don’t want people insincerely revving up the engines of their delight. But Kristina has asked me about it, so…” A party? Surely he should have a party. For a moment, he looks at me in a way that makes me feel very young. “Sweetheart, the best word I can think of to describe how I feel about my life is: surprised… Whatever we do, it won’t be jubilant.” 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. Frank’s “love” for Betty Tran (“Much of life should have quotes around it,” he observes) is surely meant to relieve the gloom of degenerative disease. Frank knows that he’s “reached the point in life at which no woman I’m ever going to be attracted to is ever going to be attracted to me.” He quite reasonably asks, “How do you stand it, these dismal facts of life, without some durable fantasy or deception or dissembling?” Naked Betty and her sweet embraces are presented as fact, as real as the chrome ram’s head on the hood of the Dodge, but even if she were presented as fantasy and the nude massage as erotic reverie, surely a writer of Ford’s inarguable talent should do better than “curvy and fleshy.” He doesn’t do explicit sex—only very rarely does he do bland cliché. President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face filled the TV screen behind the honor bar, doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini. I couldn’t take my eyes off him – tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.”

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Waterstones

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. 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.Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives--sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent--Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days. There is a desperation about Frank’s character that makes him almost unlikable, and I don’t know if that makes him lovable, or not. Ford is far too subtle to make an explicit connection between Paul’s degenerative disease and whatever has happened to our nation, but those four “granitudinally white faces” inevitably evoke an absent other. On a television screen in an airport lounge a few months earlier, Frank had caught a glimpse of “President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face … doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini.” He’s got his number: “tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.”