Richard Ford was familiar in some distant way before I read one of his books last month. Actually last year into last month. It took me a while. I knew Ford was highly regarded in modern lit and I had passed his name on library shelves before. I may have mixed him up with some other names as well. When it comes down to today, looking back at his book now finished for a couple of weeks, I don’t recall what finally made me pick it up. Oh yes I do, I saw a guy on the PATH train on the way to Newark airport, a real nervous, lit enthusiast type, short on hair combing and ironed clothes but likely to be up on books, reading a Richard Ford hardcover. I asked him if it was any good. He was twitchy and a little too serious but assured me it was great and Ford’s others were too. I decided to go with the one that was oldest, the Sportswriter. If I liked it, there would be time for the others.
Before starting the book I placed Ford in the miserable older man writer category kept in my head. Phillip Roth and John Updike echoed through early pages of the Sportswriter. That’s not to say those famous names are a guaranteed unhappy time, but their protagonists seem that way to me. Guys roaming around the suburbs, maybe traveling into the city for work, getting older.
I’ve seen this trope before. I’m not into it. I don’t know anyone who is. Well maybe one guy but regardless I have little interest in these types of stories. I’m not drawn by a curiosity toward their authors’ legendary statuses, as one might think. No, its still me, absorbed in the study of the self, thinking one of these stories has some lesson inside, some warning of an inevitable future. A revelation? Oh yeah, give me one of those. Give me all you got.
Narrator Frank Bascombe is a divorcee with a deceased young son and job as a sportswriter he is only marginally committed to. He hates New York where he works but his love for his quaint New Jersey suburban home borders on an obsession. Later we find him to be a bit of a ladies man and just a little self destructive maybe even completely morbid. But at the start we are really just sitting alongside the narrator as he speaks and observes.
Frank gives casual speeches about life and his unshakable view of its various facets. The book appears slow and Frank needs to be tolerated more than understood. Then, finally, as the quote on the back cover promised and yes, I read those and worry how much they plant in my head, the Ford pushes dialogue to the forefront. And the words in here are truly great. The outer characters speak to the narrator in more than common voices. We are given hyper-real snapshots of conversations. In these exchanges a spiral begins. The hook that pulls through Ford’s story is set. Frank is slowly revealed as a fraud, well, a gently unraveling one, and instead of tolerating his voice you wait again for it to be exposed by one of the lives that glance off his own.
Frank goes on giving speeches, to himself, justifying his ways. His reminiscences dig up raw material for the walls he builds up around himself. The fortress is clearly crumbling. His descent is slow, there are no real disasters along the way, yet we keep on waiting for that big one, for something to hit Frank and wake him up or knock him down. We trudge along listening to him talk. We tour the suburbs at his side, to awkward Easter dinners, to roadside psychics and strip malls and through strained visits with his ex-wife. When tragedy finally arrives Frank, true to himself, does not admit how ugly things really are. This truth of character may be the real accomplishment of the book.
I’m not going to say Ford transcends the other writers I put him in league with. I haven’t changed my feeling about that made up category. I cannot think of another time when pure frustration pulled me through a novel and I was happy with it doing so. Like I said, it took me a while to get through and though there were times when I felt that energy of being carried by the prose, each time I set it down I had to work back into it again.
Two or three page clips on the subway couldn’t keep me moving. I had to read in double digit stretches to get my mental pace synced with the story. I was mad at times. I never shook my head in agreement with anything.
The reader has to wait, and focus, until their eyes burn a little to find any revelation through Frank’s life. There is none for him. Raw humanity surrounds him but the exposure of it is so thin you cant come close to nodding or smiling or sighing or really feeling anything, you can only go on wishing Frank eventually would. Or that somehow a final payment for his ways comes due.
I’m looking at the next book in the Frank Bascombe series that sits on my desk. I know I’m going to read it. Independence Day came out in 1995, ten years after the Sportswriter and it won the Pulitzer. I can’t think of a sequel in any form that surpassed its original that way. And the most recent book in the series, Let Me Be Frank With You, just came out last year. So there’s my project and challenge.
Since I caught the series late I don’t have to wait in decade long stretches to find the next piece. This can be a real experiment. Will Frank keep frustrating me? Will Ford’s style change over thirty years? Let’s find out. I’m not starting on the next one right away, I need to clear my head of Frank for a while, and his voice is quite tangled in there, but I will get to it. Stick with me. Maybe we will find that revelation somewhere. We are only guaranteed to find more Frank, and the same goes for him.
