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Summary
Summary
With The Sportswriter , in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later -- after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award -- was hailed by The Times of London as "an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself."
Frank Bascombe's story resumes, in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together. He's now plying his trade as a realtor on the Jersey shore and contending with health, marital and familial issues that have his full attention: "all the ways that life seems like life at age fifty-five strewn around me like poppies."
Richard Ford's first novel in over a decade: the funniest, most engaging (and explosive) book he's written, and a major literary event.
From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
He was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944 & grew up there & in Little Rock, Arkansas. He graduated from Michigan State University & received an M. F. A. in 1970 from the University of California at Irvine. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts & American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature. He was also given the 1994 Rea Award. In 2001 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud prize. He made The New York Times Best Seller List for his title's Canada and Let Me Be Frank with You. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with his title, Let Me Be Frank With You.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Frank Bascombe meticulously maps New Jersey with a realtor's rapacious eye, and he is an equally intense topographer of his teeming inner landscape. In the first of Ford's magisterial Bascombe novels (The Sportswriter, 1986), Frank staved off feelings of loss and regret with a dissociated "dreaminess." He graduated to a more conventional detachment during what he calls the "Existence Period" of the Pen/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995). Now we find the 55-year-old former fiction writer and sports journalist in a "Permanent Period," a time of being, not becoming. He's long adjusted to the dissolution of his first marriage to women's golf instructor Ann Dykstra (which foundered 17 years earlier after the death of their nine-year-old, firstborn son, Ralph) and settled for eight years with second wife Sally Caldwell in Sea-Clift, N.J. Permanence has proven turbulent: Sally has abandoned Frank for her thought-to-be-dead first husband, and Frank's undergone treatment for prostate cancer. The novel's action unfolds in 2000 over the week before Thanksgiving, as Frank bemoans the contested election, mourns the imminent departure of Clinton ("My President," he says) and anticipates with measured ambivalence the impending holiday meal: his guests will include his 27-year-old son, Paul, a once-troubled adolescent grown into an abrasive "mainstreamer," who writes for Hallmark in Kansas City, Mo., and his 25-year-old daughter, Clarissa, a glamorous bisexual Harvard grad who's unfailingly loyal to her dad. Frank's quotidian routines are punctuated by weird but subtly depicted events: he happens on the scene of a bombing at the hospital in his former hometown of Haddam, N.J., clenches his jaw through an awkward meeting with Ann, provokes a bar fight and observes the demolition of an old building. But the real dramatic arc occurs in Frank's emotional life until the climax takes him out of his head. Ford summons a remarkable voice for his protagonist ruminant, jaunty, merciless, generous and painfully observant building a dense narrative from Frank's improvisations, epiphanies and revisions. His reluctance to "fully occupy" his real estate career ("it's really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about") illuminates the preoccupations of the boomer generation; for Frank, an unwritten novel and broken relationships combine with the dwindling fantasy of endless possibility in work and in love to breed doubt: "Is this it?" and "Am I good?" Frank wonders. The answers don't come easy. 150,000 announced first printing. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The third and most eventful novel in the Frank Bascombe series takes a whiplash turn from comedy (occasionally slapstick) toward tragedy. Every ten years or so, Ford returns to Bascombe, whose debut in The Sportswriter (1986) provided the author's popular breakthrough and whose encore in Independence Day (1995) merited the Pulitzer. Where there were considerable differences between the first novel and the follow-up--in which the once-promising writer and aspiring novelist settles for a comfortable living as a real-estate agent--the third sticks closer to the second's template. Once again, Frank ruminates on his existence over an extended holiday, in this case Thanksgiving 2000, when the country is in the midst of millennial tremors and a contested presidential election. It seems that neither death nor divorce may be permanent in Bascombe's life. He is now separated from his second wife, who had presumably been a widow, but whose first husband returns to the scene, while Frank's first wife (now widowed by her second husband) gives signs that she wants to reconcile with him. His son and daughter are now adults, with complicated adult problems and relations with their parents. Frank has moved from Haddam, N.J., a suburb much changed by gentrification and cultural diversity, to a resort community on the shore, where he now sells homes and cottages with a Tibetan refugee, a Buddhist who has Americanized his name as Mike Mahoney. At the age of 55, Frank also suffers from prostate cancer, which has brought him to the autumn of his years (hence, Thanksgiving) earlier than most. As always, Frank prefers to react than act, to roll with the punches thrown by those who wish he were someone other than who he is. Over the course of three days culminating in a holiday dinner, he absorbs more punches than at any other time in his life. Though not as consistently compelling as Independence Day (too many chickens coming home to roost), this reaffirms that Frank Bascombe is for Ford what Rabbit Angstrom is for Updike. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ford's third novel featuring realtor Frank Bascombe, previously seen in he Sportswriter 0 (1986) 0 and the Pulitzer-winning I ndependence Day 0 (1995), finds the beleaguered everyman in the "Permanent Period" of his life, where he's trying mightily to deal with present circumstances while dodging past regrets. But it's Thanksgiving week, "the time of year when things go wrong if they're going to." Frank has recently been diagnosed and is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer; his second wife has left him for her first husband (presumed dead but recently resurrected); his long-divorced first wife has suddenly (and disturbingly) expressed an interest in getting back together; and his fractious relationship with his son is soon to be tested anew as the family gathers for an organic-turkey dinner. As Frank struggles to hold onto his peace of mind, events both large and small conspire to give him an "acute case of the heebie-jeebies." A barroom brawl with a drunken florist, a real-estate deal gone sour, and an unexpected, intense bout of grieving for his first child, who died at age nine--Frank suddenly finds himself just where he doesn't want to be, mired "in the meaning of every goddamn thing." Through Frank's acerbic opinions on a host of issues, from the presidential election of 2000 to the real-estate business, friendship, and the "treacherous" nature of holidays, Ford crafts a mesmerizing narrative voice--one that gives us, with offhanded eloquence and a kind of grim mirth, "the lay of the land." --Joanne Wilkinson Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
In 1985, Ford published The Sportswriter and with protagonist Frank Bascombe began an epic story of the everyman. Ten years later, Bascombe returned in Ford's Independence Day, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a feat never before accomplished by a single work of fiction. Here, Ford revisits the story in 2000, as Bascombe deals with prostate cancer, his second divorce, and the controversial presidential election fiasco. He has moved to the Jersey shore, where he sells real estate and, over the course of 500 pages, does nothing particularly important except host a postnuclear family Thanksgiving get-together to which, against his better judgment, he has invited his ex-wife and emotionally explosive son. But, as in many literary classics, the beauty of this novel is in its presentation the word choice and perfect phrases and in Bascombe's unwaveringly honest and humorous narration. Ford manages to become his character and remove authorial boundaries, transforming his novel into a story told to us by an old friend. A fitting way to complete the Frank Bascombe legacy; recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.] Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.