Richard Ford finds lighter side of life’s miseries in new book
Frank Bascombe is back as a retiree, taking on love and loss with straightforward humour
Everyone thought they’d seen the end of Frank Bascombe, that American writer Richard Ford, whose creation had won him a Pulitzer Prize, had neatly put his most famous protagonist to bed.
Turns out there was more to write, that Bascombe, the grumpy lead of The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of The Land, had more to say. It’s just that Ford’s muse needed a spark . . . and a series of events obliged.
“After I finished The Lay of the Land and somewhat when I finished Canada, I just fell victim to all kinds of psychosomatic illnesses and stress-related things that made me think to myself, ‘Well, Jesus Christ, this isn’t fun,’ ” says Ford from his home in northern Maine.
Writing another book, a Bascombe book, it seems, was the only cure. And the same is true for this latest one. “I wanted to kind of write a book about serious things . . . but which I could also make funny.”
So Bascombe returns now in Let Me Be Frank With You as a 68-year-old retiree, worried about slipping on a patch of ice and breaking his hip. He’s living in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the death of his son, Ralph, still haunts him. Bascombe manages to weave his way through the destruction with a straightforward kind of humour that evokes laughs, but also profound contemplation of our own inconsequentiality in a much bigger stage.
Ford felt he didn’t have the stamina for a long book. “They’re hard to finish . . . you have to get all those many, many words — and I’m dyslexic — into the right place.” He also reads each book aloud once he’s finished, a process that can take up to five weeks.
So this Bascombe book is made up of four novellas, each about 60 pages long, for a total of 238 pages.
“I thought that because (the novellas) were about the hurricane or about death and dying, I felt that they had a new purchase on things.”
Things like death, aging. Frank, he said, “had never really come down to this level of seriousness” in the previous books.
“This book,” Ford said, “is about calamity. It’s about how the consequences of calamity can be borne.” And that is what he is truly interested in as a writer. “The consequences of great events. The consequences of love. The consequences of tragedy.”
So how does one bear calamity? With humour? Partly, he says: Let Me Be Frank With You is funny in many ways, a thing Ford was aiming for. But also with “candour, hence the title. Through direct confrontation. Going to see your ex-wife in the nursing home when she has Parkinson’s even though you don’t want to. Going to see a friend who’s dying in a bed in a horrible, dilapidated state even when you don’t want to. Face it. That’s what the book is really about.”
One of the threads that runs through the stories is Frank’s volunteer work: reading V.S. Naipaul to the blind, greeting vets coming home from overseas at the airport. Which strikes one as a strange thing for him. Ford doesn’t see it that way.
“You’ve got to get these guys on to the stage so they can do things. It never dawned on me that having him (greet the veterans) was anything but what any other normal person would do.
“Frank believes that it is better to act the way he acts toward these returning veterans and try to make them feel at home . . . Better than that he have a pure and limpid heart about what he’s doing. What he has is what anybody would have if they did that unless they were a nincompoop: they would have some conflict. And he has some conflict. But he thinks it’s better to act as though he didn’t.”
It’s about finding what Bascombe calls in the stories his “Default Self.” Not his ideal self, Ford is quick to correct, but his good or better self. He quotes Henry James to explain. “James said ‘If I should marry I should try to think a little better of life than I do.’ And so what James is basically saying is sometimes it’s better just to try to do the right thing.” Even if you don’t quite succeed. It’s aspirational.
Earlier this summer, “I had some, cir- cumstances: my wife broke both of her feet and I have a very, very dear friend who’s dying, and I just had a falling out with one of my very closest and oldest friends.”
He wasn’t necessarily feeling the psychosomatic illnesses he experienced after the last two books. But it wasn’t a good time. He wasn’t experiencing, he says, the “freed-up” period he usually felt between the finishing of a book and its publication, what is usually a very happy time for him.
He and his wife, Kristina, decided to go to Ireland. After a few months in Ireland, he said, “you feel something has been restored.”
Ford’s home, he and his wife cooking for a guest that’s staying on the evening we speak, Ford looking forward to grouse hunting in the next couple of days near the New Brunswick border. “These are probably emigrated Canadian grouse.”
In the book, home seems to be a tenuous place. Hurricane Sandy tore people’s houses apart. Bascombe’s former house on the coast was turned upside down, “washed backwards off its foundation, boosted topsy-turvy across the asphalt.”
Ford says his intention wasn’t as clearcut as to point out that tenuousness. “I think for myself that home as a conception has to be made of something other than sticks and mortar and bricks and things like that. Home is where you are loved,” he says simply. Frank has his wife, Sally, and his ex-wife, Ann, living nearby. And he’s got his two living kids.
“That’s why he’s stripped it all down . . . He says he’s going to take all his friends and get rid of them and keep only the five closest people to him so he can do the best with them that he can, including himself.”
While he’s still got the time and the words. In the end it’s about redemption, in a way.
This sensibility comes clear in the last story of the book, Deaths of Others. Frank has an encounter with a man named Ezekiel, who is “counting his blessings” and who mistakes Frank’s dead son, Ralph, for his remaining son, Paul.
Despite the error, and with kindness and politeness, they manage, Franks says, to exchange “a few good words.”
And with that, “The day we have briefly shared is saved.”