Tracking Frank Bascombe is a bit like tracking ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, whose life was charted in four novels by the late lamented John Updike and who, like Bascombe, found himself living in instalments, years apart.
Updike’s Rabbit books were tales from the gritty chalk-face of contemporary, mostly urban American life. So it is with the Frank Bascombe stories, whose eponymous hero first showed up in The Sportswriter (1986) At that stage in his career, he was a failed novelist turned sportswriter. Divorced from Ann, he was also lamenting the death of their young son Ralph from Reye’s Syndrome, a rare but serious illness.
In 1995 Independence Day arrived, Frank busy in the real estate game, showing people houses, sharing with the reader his canny thoughts on the market, the sellers and the buyers. He was taking soundings on American life and mores from contemporary New Jersey, specifically the fictional town of Haddam. In The Lay of The Land (2006) Frank was recovering from prostate cancer. In between times Ford delivered the much-acclaimed novel, Canada.
In these four new stories, 68-year old Frank is still reflecting on his prostate and general health. Once again he is offering - in his take-it-or-leave it fashion - highly polished reflections on property, location and people, how it takes all kinds to make a world. They are the musings of a man who has lived relatively long, who has married for the second time, and whose remaining children, a son and a daughter, are now grown up.
The first story, I’m Here, is set smack in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey. Aside from Frank’s agreeing to look at the smashed-up property of a former client and offer him some underwhelming advice, not much happens.
However, Ford is a clever manipulator, and gently racks up the human interest, as it were, so that by the second story, Everything Could Be Worse, the scene-setting is over and the stage readied for more dramatic revelation. By this point, the seasoned reader has become accustomed once again to that Bascombe stream-of-consciousness, that testy, teasing internal monologue some of us anyway, know and love.
In the story in question, Frank welcomes a black woman in her late fifties into his home in Haddam for a brief visit. She wants to look around the place again. It happens to be the home in which she was reared, in painful, if financially comfortable circumstances, four decades previously.
The third story, The New Normal, is a small masterpiece, its energy deriving from tiny but significant wavelets of resentment, concern, pathos, as Frank visits his first wife Ann, who is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease.
At this juncture, the human interest has been racked up sufficiently and you realise once again what a humane student of his fellow human beings is Richard Ford. He is also one of the most daring and exhilarating fiction-writers working in English today.
Paddy Kehoe
