Be Mine

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Yes, you can,” I say. “Shift your weight. I’ll push you.” I am pushing him—his pillowy butt, his still-muscled thighs straining, straining … Resolutely uncynical, blessed with the perceptual gifts of his creator, Frank Bascombe incarnates an old idea of America, now waning; and he knows it. The Mount Rushmore presidents, finally reached, have something “decidedly measly about them […] the great men themselves seem unapologetically apart, as if they’ve seen me, and I’m too small.” If that seems a bit on the nose, well, neither Frank Bascombe nor Richard Ford have ever shied away from the obvious – the obvious being, like everything else, part of the job. Much is made of the clinic, its physical layout and its various attempts at raising people's spirits, separate from whatever it can or can't do for them physically. Frank and Paul are united in their rejection of this atmosphere and Frank rents a vehicle, old, large, not quite a camper, for a road trip to Mt Rushmore, where he went with his parents some 60 years earlier. But,” he continues, “I’m mostly caught up in the dearth of imagination among the Democrats for not having the gumption to quietly escort President Biden off the stage. It’s just horrible. And he’s got them all convinced that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Trump. Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn old to be president. He’s not too damn old to be writing a novel ... ” You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

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I had assumed that this one would end with Frank’s funeral, or at any rate, its planning (the novels are written in the first person). But it turns out that it isn’t Frank, by now in his 70s, who lies dying in Be Mine, but another of his sons, Paul, a troubled middle-aged man who, when the book begins, has been diagnosed with ALS, a form of motor neurone disease that is also known in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it. Now in his 70's, Frank is once again on a roadtrip with his son Paul with whom he first meandered in the Pulitzer winning Independence Day, but now Paul is 47, and Frank is his caretaker since he has ALS (or Al's, as they call it). So dealing with his own aging body as well as the ever increasing needs of a person with that fatal uncompromising condition, Frank thinks it a great idea if they go to Mount Rushmore on Valentine's Day in a rented camper. Readers of The Sportswriter will remember Paul as an appealing little boy who kept pigeons in a coop behind the house in Haddam and sent them off with forlorn messages to his dead older brother—who Paul thought lived on Cape May. In the next novel, Paul was a teenager, troubled, abrasive, yet still intermittently appealing. Then he was briefly married and worked for Hallmark writing “dopey” greeting cards. Familiarity with these previous incarnations is in no way necessary, though it does add to the illusion of depth, an accretion of sedimentary layers. The astonishing core of Be Mine is the barbed, tender, despairing bond between father and son, a bond both battered and strengthened by the cruel “progress” of Paul’s disease. Ford is far too subtle to make an explicit connection between Paul’s degenerative disease and whatever has happened to our nation, but those four “granitudinally white faces” inevitably evoke an absent other. On a television screen in an airport lounge a few months earlier, Frank had caught a glimpse of “President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face … doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini.” He’s got his number: “tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.” I haven’t read the first four in the series, so I was at a disadvantage to understand Frank’s previous world. Especially, learning that the author's book in the series: Independence Day won The Pulitzer.The main story, set in the present day, concerns a teacher from Illinois named Finn who's come to New York to sit at the bedside of his dying brother. While at the hospice, Finn learns that Lily — his depressed former girlfriend with whom he's still hopelessly in love — has died by suicide. Distraught, he travels to her grave, only to be greeted by Lily herself, in the flesh — albeit, rapidly decaying flesh that causes her to smell "like warm food cooling." Because Lily says she wants her body to be moved to the forensic body farm in Knoxville, Tenn., Finn helps her into his car and off they go.

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

As readers we can feel the fear of that, and understanding of growing older, weaker, and more uncomfortable with a body that doesn’t work as well for us. It's been a while since I read the four previous works by Ford featuring and following Frank Bascombe through family and marriages and divorces and emotions, holidays, yearnings, America and more. I can't say I remember them particularly well, but I recall falling into each happily, reading them with great focus, and have each on my bookshelves. Having read this one, which may or may not be the final installment in Bascombe's world, I might very well make it a project to read them all again from the beginning. In Be Mine, Frank is now 74, working in real estate part-time, mostly a desk job, living alone, when he learns from his daughter that his son, Paul, with whom he's had an uneven relationship, has ALS. A road trip, as the other novels include, is featured here, once Paul has gone through an experimental drug program at Mayo. This is not laugh out loud funny, but the views are amusing, droll, the nature of America precise, the relationship between father and son true, and it was a pleasure to take this latest trip with Frank. The fifth, last, and saddest of the Frank Bascombe books. As always, there is fine writing, smart observations of American life and culture, and sharp humor. But there's less humor than in the past, and most of it is bitter. Looking away from Paul’s death, Frank looks instead at America – Ford’s other great subject in the Bascombe books, which now essentially constitute a social history of Ford’s own boomer generation from midlife to end times. This book is set just before Covid appeared. Ford has an interesting way of showcasing his prose as readers follow Frank glimpsing a television screen…

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It’s now a somewhat soiled and tattered abundance, actually, hedged around with dangers. In the Comanche Mall, “as in many public places now – and for perfectly supportable reasons”, Frank feels that “someone from somewhere may be about to shoot me”. The RV rental place Frank visits is called A Fool’s Paradise. This, of course, is what America is. It is also what Frank has always knowingly tried to cultivate. As he says: “The ability to feel good when there’s almost no good to feel is a talent right up there with surviving loss.” The ironies here aren’t cynically deployed. A fool’s paradise may be the only paradise we get. The book charts Frank and Paul’s time together in February 2020, just as a new virus is beginning to threaten the world. But it is a funny book, with Frank and Paul’s dialogue – decades of love contained within – reading at times like a comedy double-act. The two of them decide to take an R.V. trip from an experimental protocol at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. where Paul is, to Mount Rushmore. I wrote this book through the worst of the pandemic, and it was a big tincture of melancholy of not using my life fully enough The central character running throughout this series is Frank Bascombe, now 74 and focused on mortality and the puzzle of life. His son, Paul, is 47 and has been diagnosed with ALS, the “Lou Gehrig” disease for which there is still no cure. It is one thing to be playing out your days trying to come to grips with life’s eventual fade, it is quite a bit more challenging to be the one guiding your son to his finale.

Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford | Goodreads Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel by Richard Ford | Goodreads

This is a novel about last things, or nearly last, which is a hoot. Be Mine is laugh-aloud funny for all the soft footfall of the tragic predicament it explores. It is a milestone in American fiction, as far out and imaginative, as full of dread and the hilarity only dread can engender as we can hope for in a major novelist. One of the hallmarks of the stories, and of your work in general, is the way you depict what I’ll call the changing emotional “weather” between your characters, especially in dialogue. For his part, Ford intends to go on writing, but he’s also at peace with the possibility that whatever is in the tank, words-wise, may not “be anything”. How will he celebrate his big birthday next year? He smiles. “I am a man who generally asks my friends to just shut up and let me spend my birthday quietly. I don’t want people insincerely revving up the engines of their delight. But Kristina has asked me about it, so…” A party? Surely he should have a party. For a moment, he looks at me in a way that makes me feel very young. “Sweetheart, the best word I can think of to describe how I feel about my life is: surprised… Whatever we do, it won’t be jubilant.” Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives--sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent--Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days. In the book Frank seems trapped between the present of his experience with Paul’s illness and memories of the past. Does Ford reflect more on the past as he gets older?This is the most poignant and touching of the Bascombe novels. Frank is an asshole, but is more humble and selfless, less selfish, than in the past. His old age feels like a terminal illness and he’s beginning to suffer from “global amnesia”, which suggests dementia is on the way. Ford takes another snapshot of America in the days before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out; the novel finishes with “the long plague months” at the end of Paul’s life. There’s also an ever-present menace, which many Americans must feel: the possibility of a sniper hiding somewhere, just about to take them out. There is still something to be said about the author’s snarky humor and wit. His view of the world.