The Life and Times of Frank Bascombe: Frank Bascombe is the protagonist in a trio of books by author Richard Ford. He is a suburban everyman. Throughout the three books we follow Frank through a few select days of his life and effectively live inside his head. In the first book, The Sportswriter, we are introduced to him as a New jersey based fiction writer turned sports writer (as Ford once was, before resuming fiction) (oh, and, remind you in a small way of anyone else?). He is living a tenuous life in the shadow of the death of his 9-year old son and the subsequent divorce which may or may not have been due to grief over their lost son. In this book Frank is separated emotionally from everyone and everything -- trying desperately not to suffer any more pain. In the course of the book, he seems to accept that pain and tragedy are unavoidable byproducts of living.
Book 2, Independence Day, is at least partially about that re-engagement with the world. Frank has given up sports writing and become a realtor. His aim is to not find his place in the world but make it by attaching to his community and especially reconnecting with his wayward son whose is living with his mother and her new husband, and who may be half crazy (the son). The main theme is the complex relationship between independence and connectivity. In the end Frank seems to have moved from desiring mere engagement to desiring true connection.
Book 3 (and final, according to Ford) is The Lay of the Land wherein we find Frank in the third quarter of his life. His second wife has left him. His children are grown. He is a something of minor real estate mogul in seaside New Jersey. He has prostate cancer. Although he still finds himself fantasizing about all the things he's never done and he hasn't lost hope that at least some of them could happen, but they would have to come to him, he will not go to them. He believes he has achieved something he calls "permanence", but over the course of a Thanksgiving weekend all that changes. His attitude and situation take turns he couldn't have dreamed of. He faces death (somewhat improbably, and not from his prostate) and finally comes to terms with ancient relationships -- friends, children, ex-wives. Coming through it, he realizes permanence is perhaps not so permanent.
The preceding description is dry and dreary but that is not the impression to take of these books. That's just the high concept stuff. The real magic of these books for me was the treat of seeing everything through Frank's eyes. And I mean everything. You follow along with his days from start to finish, including all the boring mindless stuff people do every day. Like I said, for me, that's something special.
Most regular readers know that one of my hobby horses is the lack of fictional documentation of the normal life of the majority of us. Novelists, when they look at the typical middle-class life and the people that lead it, which is rarely, treat it with utter disdain. Mindless, soulless, shallow shells we are, with our selfish, amoral, even evil, tendencies rationalized and concealed (just ask Raymond Carver). Yet there's a reason a majority of us live that way, and a reason many who can't wish they could. It is a good, comfortable, secure life where dramatics are rare and there is time for reflection and examination. It's the best deal for raising a family by a long shot. Most of those who treat it with disdain can only do so because they already live it.
But the bottom line is that it is our life. It is the way we live today. It has unique contemporary, yet still primal, conflicts and resonance. Why not do what novelists are supposed to do and tell the story of it artfully? Ford does exactly that.
Frank Bascombe lives vaguely, full of day-to-day contradiction. He is an admirer of commerce, speaks and participates enthusiastically in it, but dislikes any development that may cause commerce to disrupt his comfortable world. He is a loyal Democrat, but it appears to be a tribal loyalty, rather than the result of serious political philosophy. He seeks comfort and certainty, but tells himself change is good and necessary. He takes half steps and quarter steps. He freely admits that he has lived a smaller life than he could have, but also a happier one. When one of his exs -- the one he cheated on -- offers an olive branch, he realizes he hates her. When the other -- the one who ran out on him for her first husband and may or may not have subsequently driven the first husband to suicide -- wants to come back, he's delighted. He prefers to keep an open mind, but hates his daughter's boyfriend at first sight. He loves is son, but can't tolerate him. Despite all his endless rumination and good intentions, his life is a confusing mess that he can barely understand, never mind explain. In short, he is exactly like you, me, and everyone we know.
We spend time with Frank and his thoughts as he goes about his days. We observe with him the malls and bars and roads and neighborhoods he passes through and we recognize it. He might describe the traffic jams he gets caught in; or the careful-not-to-sound-guilty conversations he has with cops; or having to urinate urgently behind a hardware store, getting caught by security, and garnering sympathy because of his prostate cancer; or of happening to encounter his dentist on the street and realizing half-way through the conversation that he wasn't been recognized -- all the kinds of mundane things that happen to all of us in one form or another. It's hard not to see this as a document of what we do through our days and how it intermingles seamlessly with our fears and dreams and hopes and failures.
Perhaps it's worthwhile to note that the primary criticism of these books is that they are overfull with observational minutiae, either geographical or philosophical. They move slowly, to seemingly trivial ends. The resolutions in Frank's development you do get are marginal and likely to be discarded in the next chapter. All that may be, but Ford's intent, it seems to me, is to simply lay it out there as it actually is. Here is contemporary life. Do you find it dull? Do you find it fascinating? Empty? Rich? Small? Scary? Brave? Sad? Comic? The spiritual precedents here are Updike's Rabbit Angstrom and Walker Percy's Binx Bollinger, but it is even a step closer to naked, tedious reality. These books serve as the finest fictional documents of the way of our lives at the turn of the millennium. It's likely that future generations will look at them for understanding of our hour-to-hour existence. Might be worth seeing what they'll see.
