Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel
Richard Ford
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel
Richard Ford
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Mr. Ford’s tendency to write in chin-stroking proverbs has brought him critics...but what’s important is less the truth of these utterances than the extent to which Frank relies on them. In Mr. Ford’s hands, clichés become koans, simultaneously resonant and hollow depending on one’s fortunes at the time, and to Frank they double as sound, practical counsel and bitter jokes.
A change from the earlier Bascombe books that Paul, though never handed the narrator’s mic, so fully shares the stage with Frank. The novels have bustled with ex-wives and girlfriends and colleagues and house hunters and the younger Paul, but they’ve never been as close to a two-hander as this one is.
Be Mine is not unlike a welcome late-evening phone call, two scotches in, from an old friend. Ford’s readers have been through a lot with this man.
Ford hides himself away and lets the inescapably, unstoppably logocentric Frank tell his tale in his own distinctive, discursive voice, a roving 'I' addicted to description and speculation. Every Bascombe book is full-on Frank.
Ford’s tough, beautiful prose grew flabbier, and his famous lead’s narration more aimless and irritable. Now, in Be Mine, reportedly the last Bascombe novel, the decline seems complete.
Frank’s observations are more persistently downcast.
A heart-wrenching story that also abounds with wit. Ford has plied his latest novel with some of the smartest repartee around.
It becomes clearer and clearer that these are, indeed, books about happiness as a project of conscious denial.
If it all sounds a little drab, it's not. Ford is, as ever, a deeply skilled prose stylist, infusing the quotidian with a kind of muscular grace. In his hands the normal feels new, the mundane extraordinary. If Be Mine is a bit smaller and less given to vintage Bascombe rambles than its predecessors, that feels right, given the way that aging can shrink one's world..
As usual the 'action' proceeds by peristalsis, with descriptions of roads, shops, real estate, traffic jams, motels, tourist attractions and free publications constantly interrupted by long, unwieldy flashbacks to all the stuff that’s happened since the last Frank Bascombe novel. It’s immersive stuff: reading these books is the closest you’ll come to being stuck in an actual traffic jam without leaving the comfort of your armchair.
This compression of fictional time and space is a challenge for Ford since Bascombe novels usually advance at a leisurely and sometimes digressive pace with lots of close attention to different locales.
Do you need to read the others first? No, though by the time Be Mine is done with you, you’ll surely want to.
Ford’s prose attains a rare combination of exquisite beauty powered by dialogue that has the casual familiarity of a jocular Everyman gifted with a winning, sly wit. Be Mine ultimately charts the journey of the human condition and the strivings, failings, and resiliency of the human heart. A fitting finale to the landmark Bascombe saga, this ranks among Ford’s best..
Throughout his Bascombe books, Ford has always set the particulars of what's going on in Frank's life against a larger American story.
The book is composed largely of delightfully odd, everyday encounters, as Paul and Frank go about their messy business as patient and carer, in a tone and manner suffused with what Frank calls 'a low-grade sensation of randomness'.
Appealing.
Frank remains a funny guy, both ha-ha funny and a little odd, but Ford couldn’t be more serious about his craft, his precision, his attention to detail, his need to say exactly what he means. If this is also Ford’s curtain call, he has done himself proud..