04/17/2023
Ford finds Frank Bascombe, star of The Sportswriter, still searching for the meaning of life in his appealing latest. Frank, 74 and twice divorced, stays buoyant despite some mortal despair by indulging in clichés such as falling for a younger massage therapist. His son, Paul, has ALS, and he proposes they road-trip together to Mount Rushmore. In a rented RV, Frank and Paul set out from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where Paul has just finished participating in a clinical study. On the way through South Dakota, they stop at the famed Corn Palace, spend a night at a rundown motel, and visit a dire casino called the Fawning Buffalo. “What causes places to be awful is always of interest,” Frank notes in Rapid City. Father and son banter with mock cruelty, but Frank’s outlook is sincere: “Not every story ends happy. Out in the gloom you can find some lights on.” These pages are steeped in melancholy, and for the most part Ford’s prose stays within the speed limit, neither soaring nor stalling, though he stops the reader cold with the occasional startling insight: Paul, divulging the details of his dementia, remarks on Frank’s indomitable mind: “You connect everything.” Ford’s fans will find much to love. (June)
"Frank Bascombe receives the send-off he deserves in this fifth book of the series, following Let Me Be Frank With You (2014)…It’s a novel about the ambiguities of love and happiness. 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.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ford masterfully captures the strained dynamic of two men attempting to articulate emotions…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.” — Booklist (starred review)
“If the Bascombe novels endure it will be partly because they serve as such comprehensive documents of the hopes and hypocrisies of the age. But it will also be because of the wonderful voice that Mr. Ford has fashioned for them—jokey, melancholic, dreamy, disagreeable and doggedly hopeful…. They are also works of tremendous craft and arrangement, full of tantalizing patterns and recurrences. In this balance of meaning and meaninglessness there has always been enough mystery to keep Frank occupied for a lifetime.” — Wall Street Journal
“Ford is among the elite American writers of the past half-century.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
“The startling and poignant conclusion unites father and son through love and grief as they learn to “give life its full due." — The New Yorker
“Ford has a loud and faithful following among writers on both sides of the Atlantic....Every sentence is considered, yet many look like they’re about to fall apart in their devious careening. Something similar can be said of the meandering Bascombe books, too: Their course, like Frank’s, is uncompassed by design. Every detour offers an opportunity to ponder….The astonishing core of Be Mine is the barbed, tender, despairing bond between father and son.” — Adam Begley, The Atlantic
“[P]lenty of heart and wry humor." — AARP Magazine
“In true Updikean fashion, Frank gives the mundane its beautiful due, and his narrative — which meanders as his life has — goes back and forward, from here to there and round again, resulting in a book to sit back and wallow in, driven by characters as much as by plot…. It’s the challenge of a writer’s life to know how to end a magnificent series of books like this....In the end, what Be Mine reminds us of is what our instincts always knew: that what will survive of us is love.” — Financial Times
Realism, in these books, is an act of worship, but not complacent worship. John Banville once called Ford “a relaxed existentialist”. It’s true. His is a realism shorn of metaphysical certainties – a 20th-century realism. Ford’s world is contingent, frightening, beautiful, comically manifold. — The Guardian
06/02/2023
Pulitzer Prize winner Ford's final Frank Bascombe novel finds Frank now 74, twice divorced and caring for his adult son Paul, diagnosed with ALS, all of which has led Frank to reevaluate his own life. Much of the novel takes place in Minnesota, where Paul is enrolled in an experimental drug study at the Mayo Clinic while Frank finds solace with a young Asian masseuse. With the study ending, Frank proposes they take a trip to Mount Rushmore, mostly as a coping strategy for both father and son and perhaps as a way for them to find a measure of peace with their situation. Leaving just before Valentine's Day, they begin an odyssey across an absurdist U.S. heartland in a rented camper too dilapidated to sleep in, arriving on a freezing Valentine's Day, where they find the expected and the quite unexpected. This is a sometimes grim and often broodingly comic meditation on aging, death, the state of the nation, and the nature of happiness in old age. VERDICT While not the best of the four Bascombe novels (e.g., Let Me Be Frank with You), it is still a worthy conclusion to a series that ranks with Updike's "Rabbit" novels for its incisive take on American life across several decades.—Lawrence Rungren
Narrator Richard Poe matches the heartfelt frustrations of life's third act in this final of Ford's five novels featuring Frank Bascombe. Ford's stand-in, now 74 and semiretired, is attempting to create final memories with his son, who has ALS. Poe's basso profundo delivery describes their road trip to Mount Rushmore in a rickety RV with just the right vibe of the edgy anxiety of dealing with a dying child in the pre-pandemic America that elected a game show host as president. Fans will hear Poe's evocative voice lower and his delivery slow as Frank's son, Paul, simultaneously provokes his father's ire and love. It's a fitting end for one of contemporary literary fiction's most celebrated series. R.O. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Narrator Richard Poe matches the heartfelt frustrations of life's third act in this final of Ford's five novels featuring Frank Bascombe. Ford's stand-in, now 74 and semiretired, is attempting to create final memories with his son, who has ALS. Poe's basso profundo delivery describes their road trip to Mount Rushmore in a rickety RV with just the right vibe of the edgy anxiety of dealing with a dying child in the pre-pandemic America that elected a game show host as president. Fans will hear Poe's evocative voice lower and his delivery slow as Frank's son, Paul, simultaneously provokes his father's ire and love. It's a fitting end for one of contemporary literary fiction's most celebrated series. R.O. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
★ 2023-04-11
Frank Bascombe receives the send-off he deserves in this fifth book of the series, following Let Me Be Frank With You (2014).
Death is very much on the mind of the 74-year-old narrator of this curtain call of a novel. But not primarily his own. His one surviving son, Paul, has contracted ALS (or “Al’s,” as they personify it), and Frank is shepherding him through what both know will be his final days—first at the Mayo Clinic in wintry, frigid Rochester, Minnesota, and then on a pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore. It’s a trip that both men find senseless and absurd, but you have to fill a life somehow, even if it’s about to end. Paul has neither forgotten nor forgiven his parents' split, their marriage doomed after the death of his brother. Now Paul’s mother (Frank’s first ex-wife) is dead as well. Frank seems adrift, but then he always has. He’s a reflective man but not a particularly deep thinker, more reactive to the vagaries of life than purposeful at determining any particular goal, direction, or meaning. But death—his first wife’s, his son’s, and eventually his own—gives him a lot to ponder about the meaning of it all, if there is any, and causes him to reflect on the life he has lived through the previous novels. One needn’t have read those to appreciate this, but it could well inspire readers to revisit the entire fictional cycle, launched to great acclaim with The Sportswriter (1986). As its title alludes, the new novel focuses on Valentine’s Day, as much as Independence Day (1995) did on that holiday: It’s a novel about the ambiguities of love and happiness. 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.
