Be Mine

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Every sentence is considered, yet many look like they’re about to fall apart in their devious careening. Reflecting several weeks later, I’d say Richard Ford’s uncomplicated prose gave a far greater depth of meaning than his everyday simple language should have delivered.

Be Mine — Richard Ford’s farewell to his four-decade protagonist

The conversations between these two men, addressing matters of life and death interspersed with observations on the midwest landscape they traverse ("I am tantalized, as always, by the dense life elsewhere, though smart enough not to breathe its fumes too deep. He is thinking about what happiness means, and of possibilities of new relationships with women and is partly disappointed in these and partly satisfied or reconciled. Now that trial is wrapping up and Frank, in a ham-fisted grab for diversion and connection with his prickly son, rents a clunker of a RV to set out for Mount Rushmore. He and Clinton, near contemporaries, are both southern boys – Ford, the son of a travelling salesman, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived across the street from the novelist Eudora Welty, but spent much of his childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, just like the former president – and his tone, half fond and half cynical, is full of knowing.

It was unfair, but a man’s contentment, he thinks, probably shouldn’t be too dependent on his writing life. The relationship between father and son is both touching and a little rowdy, but as with all Bascombe books, the relationship of Frank to the universe is what it's all about. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.

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

Composition is the arrangement of unequal things, and that’s what I do – I compose by putting together unequal things. Roosevelt faced two daunting tasks: to pull the country out of the Depression and, in the face of Nazism’s rise, to overcome U.

Be Mine is a reckoning up; it’s about happiness and what that involves (Frank defines it as what a person experiences when they aren’t unhappy, for which reason he also believes it is a state that can only really be recognised retrospectively). None of these books is plotted; they stumble from incident to incident—never artlessly, but seemingly by accident. Now Ford is bringing the Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, a novel that finds Frank, at 74, stepping up to be the caregiver for his 40-something year old son, Paul, who's been diagnosed with ALS, also known as "Lou Gehrig's disease. Frank, now in his 70s, is looking after his 47-year-old son Paul, who is dying – quickly, horribly – from motor neuron disease.

Richard Ford BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Richard Ford

Bascombe refuses to have his son looked after in some medical institution by Bascombe’s officious and worried daughter. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Granta, March) comes 10 years after the Booker-winning The Luminaries and is worth the long wait. It is, though, quite a vehicle for Ford to talk about things and situations that may make us uncomfortable and his humanity and self-awareness are on display.Already the hero of Rabbit, Run (1960) and Rabbit Redux (1971), Harry was destined to star in two more alliterative Rabbit novels, Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), as well as the postmortem novella Rabbit Remembered (2000). It is a meandering tale, not much happens and as such is perhaps a little long - hence 4 rather than 5 stars. In Sioux Falls, with Heidegger’s help, he comes to a tentative conclusion: “Being old really is like having a fatal disease, at least insofar as I’m no more ready than my son is to give up on comfort, idleness and taking grave things lightly. 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”. 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.