Richard Ford, Late Master

Be Mine is one of the best "final" novels out there

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In the basement of my apartment building is a laundry room with a bookshelf. Tenants leave behind old books and you’re free to browse and take what you’d like. There’s a healthy mix of shlock and high-brow; this Brooklyn rental building includes novels by Mary McCarthy, Ben Lerner, and Jarett Kobek. I borrowed Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers from the bookshelf and decided, earlier this year, to give a shot to the weathered paperback copy of The Sportswriter that had been sitting there for some months. I’d long known of Richard Ford but never attempted him. While waiting for the washer to finish its cycle, I opened up the first pages and entered the world of Frank Bascombe, a magazine sportswriter in his late 30s who is mourning the death of his young son. It’s around 1984, and Frank is drifting; he’s separated from his wife, and we find out he had slept with close to two dozen women while he was married. Frank is something of a slacker existentialist, eternally wry and deeply sad, and he has little regard for his profession. At one time, he had been a promising short story writer, but he could never summon the ambition or the verve to stick it out. He briefly, and disastrously, taught at a college. At least he leads an outwardly plush life in the fictional New Jersey suburb of Haddam. He is a creature of hushed cul-de-sacs, fanciful downtowns, and lush, manicured lawns. Frank and Ford share enough similarities—born in the mid-1940s, childhoods in Mississippi, undergraduate degrees from Michigan public universities, health-related discharges from the Marine Corps that saved them from the carnage of Vietnam—that it would be convenient to say that Ford is writing an autobiographical novel. But Frank’s world is too fully-realized for that. This is no autofictive venture, thankfully.

Ford is most famous for the Bascombe novels. He won a Pulitzer for his second, Independence Day, which follows Frank on a July 4th road trip with his other son, Paul, who has grown into a blubbery, unguent, pun-happy, and strangely combative teen, an alien to his Silent Generation father. Four years removed from the events of The Sportswriter, Independence Day catches Frank as a happily-converted real estate agent and landlord, his sportswriting days gone for good. If Independence Day is more lauded, The Sportswriter may be the more assured effort, poignant and hilarious and hefted with the proper amount of first-class noticing and melodious digression. First-person where John Updike’s Rabbit series preferred the Godly third—Updike strained for his own sparkle and sheen to be slathered over Harry Angstrom’s low-brow, petit bourgeois (and later outright bourgeois) world—the Bascombe novels pull closer and often feel more alive. Of a distinct American vein, they are a rambling chronicle of I-95 rest stops, ill-fated house hunts, oddball motels, and antiseptic airports. It is not an exaggeration to say Ford writes better than almost anyone else living today.

There are two Bascombe sequels I have not read—Ford has written other well-received non-Bascombe books, and was once associated with the dirty realism school of Raymond Carver—and another, Be Mine, that was just published in June. My hopes were not particularly high for Be Mine. Billed as the final Bascombe novel and perhaps the last book Ford, now 79, will publish, it received a dismissive review from Dwight Garner of the Times, who mocked the title and questioned several of Ford’s world-building choices, like assigning his adult son an obsession with the long dead English singer Anthony Newley and deciding to thrust Frank into a brief affair with a Vietnamese masseuse. Garner seemed to be impressed, at least, that Ford describes President Trump on the television screen “doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini.” My fear, when I purchased a copy of Be Mine in a Dublin bookstore, was that it would be the prototypical late-inning work of a once-great novelist. Despite what some argued, Don DeLillo’s The Silence was threadbare, a vignette dragged into novel form, and most of Philip Roth’s 2000s novels, absent Nemesis, were flimsy and bloodless, the sort of stuff a rising writer of little renown would struggle to publish. Roth and DeLillo are two of the greatest writers to ever live, and Ford has his own argument for sitting near that pantheon. I supposed I’d muddle through Be Mine and be done with it.

Instead, I cried. It’s the winter of 2020, President’s Day verging into Valentine’s Day, and Frank Bascombe is in the death-cold of Rochester, Minnesota. His first wife has died of Parkinson’s and his second has, oddly enough, left him to become a nun. Rochester is the home to the famed Mayo Clinic and Frank, 74, is not there for himself: he’s gone with his son, Paul, who is dying of ALS. Paul is 47, and not so terribly different than he was in his teen years. He calls ALS “Al’s” and acidly cuts down any attempts at sentimentality. He is rife with inscrutable jokes and putdowns; Frank repeatedly notes he is fat, warty, and resembles Larry Flynt, his thinning hair thrown into a lousy combover. He loves the Kansas City Chiefs and various shirts with sexual puns. He is not, in any classic sense, likable. Frank says Paul has been reported twice for “making his fellow ALS sufferers ‘uneasy’ with his personal views.” He long dreamed of traveling with his father in a rented RV to visit towns like Stinking Springs, New Mexico; Whynot, Mississippi; and Froid, Montana. Instead, given his condition, he’ll settle for an RV (called the Windbreaker) from Rochester to Mount Rushmore with a pit stop at the Corn Palace in South Dakota. First, father and son will have to escape the “many-tiered, many-lobed, swarming colossus” of the Mayo where “thousands enter and thousands leave 200% confident that if there is a cure for them, this is where it lives, and they’re smart sumbitches for being here.”

“Hospitals mostly dispense dread,” Frank adds. “Here, no one goes away unsatisfied, even if they leave in a box.”

There’s an old sports expression that Frank would appreciate if it were ever presented to him: playing out the string. A team plays out the string when they’re eliminated from playoff contention and still have to finish the games on their schedule. Most teams end up where they hope to never be, playing only to fulfill the obligations of a season. Ford, in Be Mine, arrives at the string-playing phase, where we all end up if we’re lucky enough to have the time to reflect on mortality. Paul is deeply unlucky; Frank merely has old age to struggle with, an arm pain that shoots up radically, the intrusions of other surprise infirmities. Unlike Paul, his exact departure month or year is less assured, and he can only take so much comfort in that. He has been successful enough. His real estate career has gifted him a somnolent and lucrative semi-retirement. These days with Paul may be the last that hold any particular meaning for him.

Ford has a love, mocking and real, for Americana. He is a road atlas writer, cozy with his turnpike turnoffs, happy to import the Chekovian to a service plaza. At one time, the Bascombe novels might have been lambasted in certain quarters for their suffocating Caucasian maleness, since Frank, the intrepid first person, is our consciousness. Now, Ford can comfortably sidestep any furor because there is no culture here to appropriate except that of a lapsed WASP from New Jersey via the South. Frank is a Democrat who resents his only daughter, Clarissa, for being a Log Cabin Republican. He is someone who can still refer to a person he saw in a hotel as a “Black lawyer lady.” He is, in sum, like many American men his age. He will quip, to a point. “Maybe we could talk more, not just tell jokes,” he suggests to Paul as they make their way to South Dakota. “I’m not worried about dying, okay? There’s not that much to talk about,” Paul eventually replies.

Death hugs the mundane. If a descent is gradual enough, there are only so many speeches that can be made, only so much tearful reckoning to be done. Existence always intrudes. Ford is most interested in what we do before and after the inevitable, how we grind on. What is the middle-class carapace against death? Something, at least. And so are the jokes, like snickering over the phrase “cornhole” or buying a picture from the World’s Only Corn Place that portrays a “sloe-eyed, vaguely Latinish, busy-haired, handsome surfer-boy” named Paul who looks nothing like Frank’s Paul. Frank’s Paul will cherish it anyway, dragging it along for the rest of the trip, as well as a ventriloquist dummy that he uses to practice his own mediocre stagecraft.

After stops at a casino and a cramped motel in Rapid City, the better digs hogged for an oratory contest that has apparently swamped the area, father and son reach the Mount Rushmore gates. The weather has cleared and other campers are ahead of them, all ready to take in the mountain sculptures on a frigid Valentine’s Day. Paul’s condition has worsened. He has a good hand, a bad hand, and struggles mightily to move himself. His speech is beginning to garble. In his wheelchair and oversized Chiefs winter coat, he is “smaller, slightly womanish—not like his mother, more like a woman who has recently become a man.” The open cold rushes at them. It is a reminder, for anyone who has cared for the progressively ill, that there’s nostalgia for each stage of decline that is left behind. The moment of diagnosis is the worst that can be imagined—until the body has crumbled further, and you long for the mobility or speech of six months ago, the lucidity that has vanished in a medicated fog. Paul isn’t there yet. He and his father are on the approach, at the Grand View Terrace—a nearer amphitheater, where the views are better, is closed for the season. Frank isn’t terribly impressed, and notes that none of the chiseled presidents (“slavers, misogynists, homophobes, warmongers, historical slyboots, all playing with house money”) could be elected today. “Something’s decidedly measly about them, something bally-hooed which they’re not up to,” Frank reflects. “The empty space between us and them is, to me, more impressive than the faces.”

And yet his son, against all expectation—and maybe reason—is awed. “It’s completely pointless and ridiculous, and it’s great,” Paul declares. His eyes are gleaming. He is the happiest Frank has ever seen him. “There’s not enough in the world that’s intentionally this stupid.” A moment later, he tells his father “we’re bonded.” They make their way back to the RV, their trip at its zenith. A different kind of novel would end around here, an elderly father and his dying son basking in the glow of their cockeyed adventure. Each man is as redeemed as they are ever going to be. But a final chapter awaits—Ford calls it “Happiness”—where we meet the inevitable. Paul succumbs, his death accelerated by the virus that will envelope the country in the next month. Frank, due to pandemic precautions, must sit outside a Scottsdale hospital in his daughter’s car as Paul draws his last breaths. It’s another savagely hot Arizona summer. Frank is grateful Paul dies “fundamentally unchanged, dedicated to being himself and giving life its full due.” In The Sportswriter, that first Bascombe novel, Paul is a little boy who kept pigeons in a coop behind his house and sent one out each night with a message for his dead brother, hoping one would reach him in Cape Cod—where he believed the dead went to rest. Paul, to Frank—and to us, perhaps—will always be that boy. The novel doesn’t end with Frank in the car, either. Contemplating the meaning of death, all Frank can really know is that “when Paul departed his life, I did not depart mine.” The string must be played out. Here, Frank finds an old lover, a twenty-something magazine intern in The Sportswriter who is now a 60-year-old medical doctor, and he decides to live with her, platonically and indefinitely. He is on the California coast, time dripping away. Can grief, he wonders, be defeated? Or merely outlived? “I haven’t had a great run, have I, Frank?” Paul asked when he was still alive. “No,” his father told him. “But you’ve done okay.”