Be Mine

Product Information

It is perpetually surprising about an impossibly sad subject matter, but it is done with an extraordinary imaginative spirit and a constantly diverting patter that deepens and does not deflect the extremity it explores so masterfully against all odds. Be Mine is a dazzling tragi-comedy about the reality of human torment that is at the same time sane, debunking, fanciful and full of absent-minded lust and daydream while never for a second losing an intrinsic heartbreaking seriousness. It’s called Be Mine and it’s set this past winter, much of it in Minnesota. Frank’s son, Paul, has developed an incurable disease at 47 and Frank takes him to the Mayo Clinic. Paul is addicted to the names of places – like Peace Falls, or Chagrin, Ohio – so Frank is determined to rent an RV and take him to as many as he can in the middle of winter. I’m not making any promises for it, but so far it makes sense to me. It’s been in my mind for about five or six years, and you never can tell if something that’s in your mind that long has a better chance of working out than if it’s in your mind for six months. So far, the parts kind of make sense. It’s a funny book about a sad set of events.

Be Mine by Richard Ford review – America, the fool’s paradise

By the time they embark on their road trip—knowing, as they’ve always known, that no miracle cure will present itself—every step Paul takes, every gesture, is a struggle. Even when he sits, his right hand trembles, “clenching and curling”; knees shudder; feet fidget. His life “pares down to arch necessities—ambulation, swallowing, talking, breathing.” Devastating as this is for Paul, it also takes a heavy toll on an already death-haunted Frank, who early in the novel scattered the ashes of his first wife. “If three house moves are the psychic equivalent of a death, a son’s diagnosis of ALS is equal to crashing your car into a wall day after day, with the outcome always the same.” They are an odd couple. Paul is 47, often in his wheelchair. They display their love through puns and insults. 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 ... ” It’s interesting to me that both Ford and my musical idol, Bruce Springsteen, have focused their latest works on aging, death, and loss of close ones. Listen to Springsteen’s last album, Letter to You, to see what I mean.Denis Donoghue says language is where we find values in action. In a way it substitutes for other types of possible actions within stories, physical actions: the cavalry coming over the hill, a man walking through the door holding a gun, all of those things. Sometimes language is just the action of the story. Lots of summer books traditionally invite readers on a road trip, but when literary masters like Richard Ford and Lorrie Moore are in the drivers' seats, the only thing we readers can count on is that we'll travel far beyond the range of GPS. The thing about living this way is that you think nothing of driving 2,000 miles to reclaim something you’ve left behind.” Richard Ford is talking, via Zoom, about his recent move from Maine, in the northeastern corner of the USA, where he lived when I last spoke to him in 2020, to the southern city of New Orleans.

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

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. 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.

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.

Richard Ford BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Richard Ford

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. In fact, says Ford, the pleasure for him is all in the writing of the book, rather than the responses from readers. “It’s all in the doing for me. I’m constantly thinking to myself, is this working the way I need it to work? Or is my delight something the reader will never share? As readers we can feel the fear of that, and understanding of growing older, weaker, and more uncomfortable with a body that doesn’t work as well for us. I got more than i bargained as I discovered a talented storyteller and read a novel that moved me to tears and made me laugh. 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.Advancing age brings with it the examination of what life is all about. Frank had his own concerns, but they are framed much differently when it is his son’s story he is defining. Death has become the undeniable reality and its progress is being measured by Paul’s decline, something Frank cannot ignore. 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. In 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. 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.”