Richard Ford opens his latest book with a scene of shell-shocked Jersey Shore residents buying home-repair items in the weeks following Hurricane Sandy. The image prompts his aging, increasingly forgetful, cancer-surviving, vertigo-suffering narrator to quip, “Nothing smells of ruin as fragrantly as the first attempts at rescue.”
But take note — that’s not just any old cynic throwing (even more) cold water onto the hopes and dreams of plucky storm survivors. It’s none other than Frank Bascombe, a character who knows a thing or two about loss and rebuilding.
Ford won a Pulitzer Prize for “Independence Day” (1995), the second in an acclaimed trilogy of novels, written over a 20-year period, in which he carefully transcribed the heady internal monologue of Frank, the author’s entrant into American fiction’s Deeply Contemplative Everyman contest. (Previous winners include Rabbit Angstrom and Augie March.) Now Frank has returned, ushering us through the four linked novellas in “Let Me Be Frank With You” — which arrives, like an early Christmas gift, to soothe fans who assumed they’d never again have the pleasure of wading through his stream of consciousness.
It’s a winding stream, to be sure, and not always a fast-moving one. But it’s hard to think of another that runs past so many major landmarks of our anxious era: the dissolution of families, the fear of failure, the erosion of faith and — especially — the supplanting of old, familiar social structures with a new, esoteric code that exists primarily in the smartphone apps of people born after 1980. To this list of psychic burdens we can now add a few more that the 68-year-old Frank has racked up as he’s drifted out of middle age and into (slightly) cranky senior-citizen status: the fear of falling and breaking a hip, the near-certainty that valet parking-lot attendants are taking his car out for wild teenage joyrides, and the uneasy conviction that pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off optimism represents a high-risk bet against a house that almost always wins.
Things fall apart; people, too. The four lengthy stories in this collection, each of them set during the lead-up to Christmas 2012, present Frank in the winter of his mild discontent, doing his best to remain placidly philosophical amid signs of entropy from within and without. He has managed to survive not only prostate cancer but also the gunshot wound that made for the climactic ending of “The Lay of the Land” (2006). His ex-wife, now suffering from Parkinson’s, has recently moved into a high-end assisted-living facility just close enough to Frank’s current home to oblige him to visit her every now and then.
Ever since we were first invited to tag along with Frank on his inner journey in “The Sportswriter” (1986), we’ve had to marvel at this character’s enviable capacity for accepting big changes, and especially for saying goodbye: to children, wives, youthful ambitions, careers, states, cities, houses and more. In these stories, Ford gives us a weathered and winded Frank, someone who has roughly calculated how many laps he has left around the track and is now doing all he can to remove any hurdles that might trip him up. instances acts nice.”
Though he rarely makes jokes , Frank is essentially a comic character, and a stock one at that: the earnest yet hapless planner whose plans are forever being thwarted by fate. All Frank wants to do is spend some quiet time with his wife (with whom he has happily reconciled after a breakup), volunteer at the local radio station, hand out “welcome home” packets to returning servicemen and servicewomen at the airport, and generally just ease his way toward life’s finish line in as gracious, honest and respectable a fashion as possible. But like Buster Keaton, another deadpan philosopher who preferred to keep quiet, Frank is never allowed to get what he’s after. Something keeps getting in his way. And that something, almost always, turns out to be the ravenous hunger of others for witness and forgiveness, for company and closure.
There’s the rub. As self-aware as he is, Frank seems continually surprised not only by how much others need him, but by how good he actually is at offering his counsel and sympathy, at simply being there for other people.
But in the last pages of the collection’s final story, set on Christmas Eve, Frank gives an old, sick friend a much-needed gift and then walks outside to receive a gift of his own. In both instances the gift is little more than a basic connection capable of shrinking that “infinite remoteness” down to the space between two people who happen to be talking and listening to each other. It’s a quiet grace note of an ending — so quiet, though, that one has trouble believing this is really the way Ford wants to leave things between us and Frank. The author has already extended his Bascombe “trilogy” by one book. At this point, many hopeful readers are wondering, who’s counting?
NOVELLA: AGING ANGST
Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book
by Richard Ford (Ecco)
