If someone comes up to me and says, ‘I read your book, it wasn’t worth a s**t’ – that would make me unhappy.

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Book review | The TLS

All of that, even his beloved Haddam, even the recent death from Parkinson’s of his first wife (Paul’s mother), is shoved to the side by his surviving son’s illness. Ford is wonderfully rich and variegated in the way he can capture the curve and contour of any encountered figure from the past or present. I love spending time with Ford’s meandering prose, his long overland journeys, his drab suburbia and strip malls, his melancholy of bad decisions and bad behaviour, his gentle crescendos of experience over national holidays. Always the meditative humanist (at one point he kept a copy of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in his car), Frank dedicates himself in Be Mine to the problem of happiness—a problem particularly acute when you’re a septuagenarian caring for your dying middle-aged son. It is perpetually surprising about an impossibly sad subject matter, but it is done with an extraordinary imaginative spirit and a constantly diverting patter that deepens and does not deflect the extremity it explores so masterfully against all odds.Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to thegreat American midway. Roosevelt faced two daunting tasks: to pull the country out of the Depression and, in the face of Nazism’s rise, to overcome U. With nods to Umberto Eco, it tells the story of Beatrice, the librarian of a convent who comes into possession of a book of dark and stunning power. During the lockdown years, I kept reading articles by novelists saying how unproductive they were feeling, how virus narratives had colonised their subconscious minds, destroying the creative impulse.

Richard Ford: ‘Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn Richard Ford: ‘Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn

But when I started writing about him as a real estate agent, I found that it was an entrée into so many things about the country: the economy, people’s investment in their own futures, places where they live and die, all of these things became my remit, in essence. As a child, he taught himself to play his mother’s piano, then learned the clarinet, the flute, and the saxophone (his main instrument). Paul’s condition is rapidly deteriorating, and Frank finds himself in the role of caretaker, assisting his son increasingly more often in performing his basic functions.And that was Richard [Ford] getting to a moment in which he didn’t know what to do, and so I had that line floating around in my notebook, and I just slammed it in there. I give another grunting upwards lift, ignoring everything but what I’m doing and doing my best to do. The story of a put-upon everyman, it is a sad and quietly devastating portrait of middle-aged life in suburbia.

Be Mine: : Richard Ford: Bloomsbury Publishing Be Mine: : Richard Ford: Bloomsbury Publishing

High on the list of the things he worries about is Kristina, who he wants only to be healthy and happy. I don't think this is the best book to start reading Richard Ford's novels but this was my first one and was a sort of novice. Now Ford is bringing the Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, a novel that finds Frank, at 74, stepping up to be the caregiver for his 40-something year old son, Paul, who's been diagnosed with ALS, also known as "Lou Gehrig's disease. The fifth, and reputedly the last, of Ford’s books about the character Frank Bascombe, this novel finds Frank now in his seventies and confronting his son Paul’s devastating illness.

It's a compact, smooth read with humour and wryness sprinkled in, but deals mainly with longing and loss and relationships. And as with Larry McMurtry's Duane Moore, what started out as a standalone novel has expanded into several sequels as Ford has found more and more issues to address. Hoffman, in her review, suggested that Frank’s happiness was just a project of denial – that he was an egoist who “chooses to ignore tangled, emotionally charged family relationships, fixating instead on non-relationships and non-events”.

Be Mine’ Shows the Trump Era Through Frank Bascombe’s Eyes ‘Be Mine’ Shows the Trump Era Through Frank Bascombe’s Eyes

Was it that Ford, who is 79, wanted to subvert this – even to rail against it – by making Frank the carer rather than his son? Whatever else the year ahead brings, at least we have this collection of supremely good novels to comfort, challenge, instruct and entertain us through it.

But I will say that its survival is a whole lot less dependent on who the president is than it is on our position vis-a-vis our antagonists. and, for the past two months, Frank and Paul have been living a suspended existence in a rented house close to the Mayo Clinic, where Paul has been part of a trial study.