Be Mine

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There can be no happy ending here, and Frank knows it. But “I happen to believe there’s plenty to be said for a robust state of denial about many things – death being high on the list”. 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’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.

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Waterstones

I find it hard to subordinate what’s happening now to anything I would have written about it. Because what’s happening now will eventually have to become subordinate to people’s imaginations, but I don’t feel I have the language for what’s happening now. I wish, in a way, I did. This pandemic is going to produce some wonderful literature. That’s not much of a solace to us, but I wouldn’t even try to apply my thinking about these stories to the situation that’s before us now, because all those stories were framed around a world that’s in jeopardy of never existing again. The stories feel almost quaint.Richard Ford remains my favourite author. He captures the mundane inner life of an ordinary Joe, and in the process the reader gains significant insights into America - the country, people, politics, landscape, society, and memorable incidental characters. Much is made of the clinic, its physical layout and its various attempts at raising people's spirits, separate from whatever it can or can't do for them physically. Frank and Paul are united in their rejection of this atmosphere and Frank rents a vehicle, old, large, not quite a camper, for a road trip to Mt Rushmore, where he went with his parents some 60 years earlier. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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 typicalBascombe 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. The main story, set in the present day, concerns a teacher from Illinois named Finn who's come to New York to sit at the bedside of his dying brother. While at the hospice, Finn learns that Lily — his depressed former girlfriend with whom he's still hopelessly in love — has died by suicide. Distraught, he travels to her grave, only to be greeted by Lily herself, in the flesh — albeit, rapidly decaying flesh that causes her to smell "like warm food cooling." Because Lily says she wants her body to be moved to the forensic body farm in Knoxville, Tenn., Finn helps her into his car and off they go.

Richard Ford on his new short-story collection and how Richard Ford on his new short-story collection and how

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.” From Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford: the final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, one of the most indelible characters in American literature Richard Ford’s Be Mine is a dazzling tragi-comedy about the reality of human torment. Credit: Leonardo Cendamo 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… MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

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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 And then he is almost in. I give another grunting upwards lift, ignoring everything but what I’m doing and doing my best to do. And in he sags. At which point nothing else matters. I teach literature at [New York-based] Columbia University and I’ve been doing that by “distance learning.” 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. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful roles--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.

Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford, Hardcover Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford, Hardcover

In brief, the novel tells two stories: The slighter, opening one is set during the Civil War. Through letters and a journal we meet a woman named Elizabeth who keeps a boarding house where she fends off a sly "gentleman lodger" — an itinerant actor — who, she says, "is keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood ..." 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.”

Frank Bascomb's 47 year old son has Lou Gehrig's disease and Frank is taking him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I liked this book because I got a real feel for Minnesota in the winter and a real feel for the atmosphere surrounding the Mayo Clinic. Ford is so self-deprecating and sarcastic that it pulls on your natural sympathies much more so than if he tried to get your sympathy. I loved the son who is described by his father as being fat, balding, with warty fingers. He always wears the worst clothes and sweatshirts with sayings on them like "Genius at Wrok". 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. 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.

Be Mine’ Shows the Trump Era Through Frank Bascombe’s Eyes ‘Be Mine’ Shows the Trump Era Through Frank Bascombe’s Eyes

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. The central character running throughout this series is Frank Bascombe, now 74 and focused on mortality and the puzzle of life. His son, Paul, is 47 and has been diagnosed with ALS, the “Lou Gehrig” disease for which there is still no cure. It is one thing to be playing out your days trying to come to grips with life’s eventual fade, it is quite a bit more challenging to be the one guiding your son to his finale. 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. 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.” You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side.

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. 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.” A line in the novella The Run of Yourself reads: “Things happen that seem life-altering, then everything grinds down to being bearable – sometimes slightly better,” which felt resonant in this pandemic moment. Do you think it applies? The four chiseled visages. L to R—Washington (the father), Jefferson (the expansionist), Roosevelt #1 (the ham, snugged in like an imposter) and stone-face Lincoln, the emancipator (though there are fresh questions surrounding that). None of these candidates could get a vote today—slavers, misogynists, homophobes, warmongers, historical slyboots, all playing with house money.