A New Book, by a famously horrible person

A guest review by Norman Sigurdson

I just read Richard Ford’s fifth (and presumably final) novel centred on the New Jersey real estate salesman Frank Bascombe: “Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel,” and it is a wonderful achievement. Ford is a towering figure in American fiction, and Bascombe is one of his greatest creations.

I can vividly remember reading Frank Bascombe’s first appearance in “The Sportswriter” way back in 1986. In this latest outing it is 2020, and Frank is now 74 years old (Ford himself is 79) and is living in a rented apartment in Rochester, Minnesota, while his 47 year-old, son Bill, who we first met in 1995’s “Independence Day,” is undergoing experimental therapy at the Mayo Clinic for ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease) from which he is slowly dying.

In a last ditch effort to bond with his oddball son before his inevitable death, Frank rents a motor home and sets out on one of Ford’s typically bizarre road trips, this time to Mount Rushmore.

Frank, as in all of the earlier novels, is a digressive motor-mouth concerned more with his own experiences and perceptions than anything else. In this novel Frank does show his love for the not very lovable Bill in his final days, but he also shows how embarrassed he is  by him as he explores his own intimations of mortality.

Ford himself, outside of his novels, is a famously horrible person. The novelist Alice Hoffman once wrote a mixed review of one of Ford’s books and Ford sent her a copy of one of her own books with a bullet hole in the middle of it. More infamously Ford walked up to Colson Whitehead, the great Black Pulitzer Prize winning author, at a literary event and spat in his face because he thought Whitehead’s review of a book years earlier wasn’t reverential enough.

So, it seems, we learn again that you can be a great artist and awful person at the same time.