Be Mine by Richard Ford

Published by ‎ Ecco on June 13, 2023

Thrillers and other genre novels often follow a character who stars in a series of novels. Literary fiction has fewer recurring protagonists. Off the top of my head, my favorites are Jim Harrison’s Sunderson, John Updike’s Rabbit, and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe.

Bascombe was a sportwriter when he debuted as a protagonist. He later became a real estate salesman. Now he’s retired and thinking about death. Not so much his own, although at 74, “with a modest laundry list of ailments and sorrowing memories,” he knows his end is approaching. He thinks about his mother’s lifeless face, about a son who died at the age of 9, about the death of a former wife, about friends who have passed away. But mostly he thinks about his son Paul, who has ALS (“the bad kind”) and will soon stop breathing. Frank knows “there aren’t many chances left to do things right.”

Paul is 47. He has always been annoying and a mild asshole, or at least Frank has seen him that way, probably with good reason. Paul is unfriendly, sloppy, snarky, and alienated. He makes unfunny jokes with his ventriloquist’s dummy but he moves his lips, making him a failure at comedy. Approaching death hasn’t improved his disposition. Paul has always taken an unserious approach to life. In that regard, he is closer to his father than Frank would like to admit.

On the other hand, Paul loves puns and quirky language. He asks whether steeple jacks are all named Jack, whether civil servants are always civil, whether daredevils are really devils. He views life in relative terms, as “contingencies, bemusements, sly looks, and the unexamined way being all there is.” Frank always thought Paul was an odd boy who would grow up to be normal. It never happened and now it never will.

Frank fears that he has been less supportive, less loving, than he should have been during his son’s life. Since he refers to his son by such terms of endearment as “dimwit,” it is easy to understand those fears. Frank doesn’t like his son much but, to be fair, he doesn’t like his daughter either. Frank numbers Paul’s faults — the number is high — and chides himself for wondering how this man can be his son. Yet Frank’s strongest experience in the face of his son’s illness is helplessness.

The plot takes Frank on a journey to Minnesota so that Paul can participate in a clinical trial for a new ALS drug at the Mayo Clinic. Frank decides to rent an RV and take Paul on a father-son trip to Mount Rushmore, perhaps not the wisest destination in February. It’s a late and lame attempt at bonding time, but Paul goes along with it because Paul goes along with everything.

Paul fills the trip, as he has filled his life, with snarky commentary. The highlight for Paul is the Corn Palace. It’s particularly suited to his desire to embrace the absurd. A place where he can buy corn sunglasses is his idea of Heaven. He appreciates Mount Rushmore because it’s “completely pointless and ridiculous.” Frank feels the same way about the monument, creating a bonding moment — one of the few he’s ever had with his son. He thinks it is better to bond over the ridiculous than to bond over approaching death. Frank believes that growing old is “like having a fatal disease, at least insofar as I’m no more ready than my son to give up on comfort, idleness, and taking grave things lightly.”

Ford paints a mesmerizing and sometimes dismal portrait of the landscape, small towns, billboards, tribal casinos, and oddities of South Dakota. “There are scarcely towns at all — land and sky merging at a far distance, stitched by a jet commencing the polar route.” Rapid City is a “soul-less splat of mini-malls, tower cranes, franchise eats, car purveyors, and new banks” — in other words, a cocondensed version of Los Angeles.

Ford introduces motel owners, tourists, waitresses, and the other people everyone meets on a road trip, making the kind of connections that occur when Americans “conduct an earnest but inconsequential exchange” with a stranger. One stranger admits to being from New Jersey; the other describes something that happened to him in New Jersey. It’s not a great connection, but it’s a connection, a reminder that we’re all part of the same plot.

The novel is haunting in its honesty. Frank’s reaction to his son’s death is almost nihilistic. He doesn’t see his son as a hero for clinging to life (not that Paul makes much of an effort). Frank refuses to wish that Paul will live an extra hour or day or month because he knows that the wish would be futile. Frank views continued existence as a product of luck, or something genetic, something we don’t understand and mostly can’t control. He is happy that his son will die within a year after his symptoms begin, as other sufferers of ALS endure a much slower death, living as a mind trapped in a body that over a period of years loses its ability to move, to speak, and eventually to breathe. There is nothing good or bad about death; it’s inevitable. Only the circumstances can be graded on a relative scale.

The novel ends with a discussion of “true happiness”: how young writers try to define it and tie it to its causes, joining it to guilt and tragedy. Frank finds it a waste of time to worry about causation; most causes are obvious, at least in retrospect, but that knowledge has limited value when planning a lifelong road trip to happiness, given the detours that cannot be foreseen. As an old man, Frank’s best road to happiness is one that is free of worry and planning. Sleep, eat, enjoy encounters with beauty. Sit on a couch. Walk a dog. Don’t think about how life will end, lest you make the ending more difficult than it needs to be.

Along those lines, the book’s most important message is summarized in its final pages: “that the most important thing about life is that it will end, and when it does, whether we are alone or not alone, we die in our own particular way. How that way goes is death’s precious mystery, one that may never be fully plumbed.” It amazes me that such a depressing story about two seriously flawed people can be so enriching, but over the years, I’ve come to expect amazement from Richard Ford.

RECOMMENDED

Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on May 12, 2020

Sorry for Your Trouble collects stories of loss, usually caused by death or divorce. Many of the characters have ties to Louisiana or Ireland, although Maine and Paris seem to be their preferred vacation destinations. They have generally reached (or at least are approaching) an age that permits sober reflection on mistakes made and reckonings to come.

My favorite entry in this nine-story collection, “Second Language,” is one of the longer ones. After his wife’s sudden death evicts him from his “infallible, magical, irreplaceable world,” a businessman moves from Idaho to New York and meets a divorced woman who feels her life is “composed of some strange, insubstantial paper that she couldn’t quite keep hold of.” They marry, but he depended on his first wife to invent the “workable, reliable mind-set” that made him feel married, and is disappointed that his second wife has a more independent view of partnership. His new wife, on the other hand, understands that her husband “believed in greater and greater closeness, of shared complications, of difficult-to-overcome frictions leading to even greater depths of intimacy and knowledge of each other,” while she simply isn’t that kind of person. Ford dissects the lives and philosophies of the two principal characters, their relationship and its aftermath, exposing hidden barriers to the kind of understanding (of life, ourselves, other people) that we expect or hope to achieve.

I also give high marks to “The Run of Yourself.” After the death of Peter Boyce’s Irish wife, Peter rents a summer house in Maine near the one he and his wife used to rent. He rents a different house — not the one in which his wife died — so he can revisit pleasant memories without being haunted by thoughts of the crusty person his wife became after she fell ill. A visit from his daughter only underscores the distance between them. He has come to realize that he only needs to make small adjustments in his life because, at his age, there is “nothing further to learn or imagine or re-invent.” Doing a favor for a troubled young woman might change his mind about that.

With two exceptions, I enjoyed all of the remaining stories, although to a slightly lesser extent. In “Nothing to Declare,” a relatively young Sandy “nonchalantly loved” Barbara when they traveled to Iceland together, but the emotion was fading by the time he left her there. “She was, he felt, pretentious and self-infatuated. Leaving was a fine idea. What he’d been missing was miss-able. In the stark light her face bore a coarseness he hadn’t noticed, but supposed he would come to dislike.” A couple of decades later, when Sandy kisses Barbara in New Orleans during a chance encounter, Sandy’s feelings are ambiguous, but it isn’t clear that either Sandy or Barbara have fundamentally changed.

The transplanted Irishman in “Happy” dies after living an intellectual’s life. Bobbi “Happy” Kamper, his “surviving paramour,” joins friends for end-of-summer cocktails in Maine, a gathering that represents “a reversion to some way of being that pre-dated everything that life had sadly become.”

In “Displaced,” a 16-year-old boy who lost his father hopes to bond with an older Irish boy, but the friendship only increases his confusion about life. A divorcing American in “Crossing” who encounters brash American tourists in Ireland before he visits with his solicitor wonders whether he would be pathetic if he were to let a tear leak out in remembrance of the past.

In “Jimmy Green — 1992,” the disgraced former mayor of a small Louisiana town winds up in Paris for no particular reason. He watches the results of the American election in an American bar with a French woman and, because of his slight preference for the winning candidate, learns that Americans abroad can be even more obnoxious than Americans at home. The unpleasant episode is easily written off as an inevitable advance in the disassembling of his life.

 “Leaving for Kenosha” struck me as a story of less substance. The friend of the daughter of a divorced man is moving to Kenosha with her family. The divorced man has “a feeling of impendment” as he thinks about his daughter one day growing up and moving away. “A Free Day,” the story I liked the least, briefly follows a woman who is having an affair of convenience.

Ford has achieved a perfection of style, a fluid and harmonious voice that few writers manage with such consistency. His characters have a fundamental decency that allows them to grieve their losses without anger. They are civilized if a bit too restrained for their own good. They aren’t the kind of people who make headlines, for reasons good or bad, but they remind the reader that people who are capable of using their intellect are always striving for a balance of intellect and emotional awareness that is incredibly difficult to achieve.

RECOMMENDED

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

First published in 1986

At some point in The Sportswriter, the title character talks about feeling "a hundred things at once, all competing to take the moment and make it their own, reduce undramatic life to a gritty, knowable kernel." That, I think, is what Richard Ford's novel tries to do. The Sportswriter is a snapshot of a man's undramatic life in middle age, an attempt to make it knowable.

There are those who become bored by novels that lack a conventional plot -- a murder mystery to solve, an alien invasion to defeat -- but it isn't fair to complain (as have many Amazon reviewers) that "nothing happens" during the course of The Sportswriter. Plenty of things happen during the short time span the novel covers: Frank Bascombe visits his son's grave, takes a trip to Detroit with his girlfriend, interviews a mentally shaky former athlete, has Easter dinner with his girlfriend's family, gets punched in the mouth, has significant conversations with his ex-wife and an old girlfriend, endures a male friend's unwelcome advance, chats with a teenage girl after a car knocks a shopping cart into the phone booth he occupies, flirts with an office intern ... nothing terribly exciting, no bombs to disarm or terrorists to defeat, just the random events of a life. But as Frank muses about those events, and as he recalls other events that shaped his life in ways large and small, we come to know him, to understand him ... and, with luck, we may understand ourselves or our friends and family a bit better for the effort of examining Frank's life.

It's unusual and oddly comforting to read a novel about a man who is coming to terms with the tragedy in his life (his son's death and his subsequent divorce), who is neither cynical nor self-loathing, who is trying to live decently and who admits his mistakes. What The Sportswriter lacks in dramatic tension it makes up for with insightful examination: of attitudes, emotions, lifestyles, relationships. It is filled with lessons: happiness comes from living in the moment without the distracted wondering about other, better moments that might exist; an attempt to know everything about another person during a one night stand becomes a miserable substitute for self-knowledge; the future is a mystery to be embraced; the "world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being." Yet for all the lessons Frank has learned, he's living a deliberately isolated life; he professes to like people but most often stands apart from them, perhaps afraid of new attachments in the wake of losing his son and wife. Frank claims that to be a sportswriter "is to live your life mostly with your thoughts, and only the edge of others'." Frank refuses to admit that his superficial relationships are not caused by his chosen profession. As a defense mechanism against pain, he lives his life largely within his own mind (a state he describes as "dreaminess"), yet he desperately wants to feel close to (and even marry) a girlfriend who he knows isn't right for him. Frank clearly has more to learn, and that too, I think, is one of the book's lessons.  Frank continues to try; he's holding his life together and slowly reopening himself to the world around him.

Finally, the novel is beautifully written. Ford has a pitch-perfect ear for dialog and regional speech patterns. I think The Sportswriter is a remarkable achievement. Although it isn't the right novel for readers who crave fast action or a plot-driven story, I admired it immensely.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED