Denis Donoghue says language is where we find values in action. In a way it substitutes for other types of possible actions within stories, physical actions: the cavalry coming over the hill, a man walking through the door holding a gun, all of those things. Sometimes language is just the action of the story. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

Richard Ford: ‘I just make up shit to worry about at 3am’

Now in his 70's, Frank is once again on a roadtrip with his son Paul with whom he first meandered in the Pulitzer winning Independence Day, but now Paul is 47, and Frank is his caretaker since he has ALS (or Al's, as they call it). So dealing with his own aging body as well as the ever increasing needs of a person with that fatal uncompromising condition, Frank thinks it a great idea if they go to Mount Rushmore on Valentine's Day in a rented camper. The two faces of tragedy and comedy are always joined, for me,” says Ford. “It wasn’t always important to me. But as I got on with life, and realised I was trying to write great books, in those [other] great books I cared about was tragedy and comedy joined.” All but retired, rooted in Haddam, New Jersey, a town “as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant,” Frank has a part-time job answering phones in the office of a “boutique realty entity” with the inspired name of House Whisperers. In the earlier books, he endured the death of his oldest son, age 9; two divorces; prostate cancer; and being shot in the chest—as an innocent bystander—by a punk with an AR-15. All of that, even his beloved Haddam, even the recent death from Parkinson’s of his first wife (Paul’s mother), is shoved to the side by his surviving son’s illness. In Rochester and on the road, Frank and Paul are “alone together, joined unwillingly at the heart.” This is the most poignant and touching of the Bascombe novels. Frank is an asshole, but is more humble and selfless, less selfish, than in the past. His old age feels like a terminal illness and he’s beginning to suffer from “global amnesia”, which suggests dementia is on the way. Ford takes another snapshot of America in the days before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out; the novel finishes with “the long plague months” at the end of Paul’s life. There’s also an ever-present menace, which many Americans must feel: the possibility of a sniper hiding somewhere, just about to take them out. There can be no happy ending here, and Frank knows it. But “I happen to believe there’s plenty to be said for a robust state of denial about many things – death being high on the list”.

Broadcasts

I’m happy to say that if it hadn’t been for Updike, I probably would never have had the temerity to think that I could write connected books One of the hallmarks of the stories, and of your work in general, is the way you depict what I’ll call the changing emotional “weather” between your characters, especially in dialogue. As he did so often in the earlier novels—especially The Sportswriter, when his sexual magnetism (age 38) was irresistible and his conquests legion—Frank seeks the comfort of a woman’s love. He visits a massage parlor called Vietnam-Minnesota Hospitality, improbably located in an isolated farmhouse 18 miles north of Rochester. His “massage attendant,” Betty Duong Tran, is a diminutive 34-year-old “with bobbed hair … darkly alert eyes … pert, friendly gestures.” Frank takes Betty on dinner dates; afterward, “inside my still-frozen car … we’ve kissed and embraced sweetly a time or two.” The smarmy soft focus is unusual for Ford, but less disappointing than the safe, generic description that accompanies those occasions when Betty—“for reasons I never anticipate”—decides to strip naked for the massage session: “Undressed, she is as tiny as she seems clothed, but unexpectedly curvy and fleshy where you wouldn’t expect.” But,” he continues, “I’m mostly caught up in the dearth of imagination among the Democrats for not having the gumption to quietly escort President Biden off the stage. It’s just horrible. And he’s got them all convinced that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Trump. Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn old to be president. He’s not too damn old to be writing a novel ... ” The central character running throughout this series is Frank Bascombe, now 74 and focused on mortality and the puzzle of life. His son, Paul, is 47 and has been diagnosed with ALS, the “Lou Gehrig” disease for which there is still no cure. It is one thing to be playing out your days trying to come to grips with life’s eventual fade, it is quite a bit more challenging to be the one guiding your son to his finale.

The Guardian Fiction to look out for in 2023 | Fiction | The Guardian

I haven’t read the first four in the series, so I was at a disadvantage to understand Frank’s previous world. Especially, learning that the author's book in the series: Independence Day won The Pulitzer.It’s now a somewhat soiled and tattered abundance, actually, hedged around with dangers. In the Comanche Mall, “as in many public places now – and for perfectly supportable reasons”, Frank feels that “someone from somewhere may be about to shoot me”. The RV rental place Frank visits is called A Fool’s Paradise. This, of course, is what America is. It is also what Frank has always knowingly tried to cultivate. As he says: “The ability to feel good when there’s almost no good to feel is a talent right up there with surviving loss.” The ironies here aren’t cynically deployed. A fool’s paradise may be the only paradise we get. Frank, our protagonist is now 74, mostly retired. He was a sportswriter before doing real estate. He now is into observing the human condition. Frank’s grown son, Paul has A.L.S., (Lou Gehrig’s disease), and time is short.

Richard Ford’s latest novel: A review of Be Mine Richard Ford’s latest novel: A review of Be Mine

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is, here, once more our guide to the great American midway. The fact of Donald Trump’s election continues, even now, to seem preposterous to him. But Ford believes – or perhaps he only chooses to believe – that his presidency was an interregnum, not the start of a downward spiral. “The republic is fairly ebullient and I don’t think he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected again. Partly, he’s too old, just like Biden. Partly, he’s probably insane. I think it’s become glaringly obvious to everybody that he’s delusional.” So democracy will endure in the US? “I don’t know the answer to that, and I won’t be here anyway. But I will say that its survival is a whole lot less dependent on who the president is than it is on our position vis-a-vis our antagonists. The fact that we cannot stop this insane war in Ukraine. Americans are taking it as a given that we can’t stop it. And what’s happening with the Chinese. I don’t have much of an idea about that, but I know it’s nothing good. They’re not riven by doubts. They’re not riven by ethical conflicts. And I don’t think we’re in a position to do anything about them.” I assume when I’m in Walgreens [the chemist] – and unfortunately, at my age, I often am in Walgreens – that 50% of people there are carrying. The reason they are doing this, ostensibly, is in case some malefactor tries to shoot them. But it’s blurry because I can tell you that when you walk around carrying a firearm, you look at everybody as a potential target. You’re basically thinking subliminally about the possibility that you will shoot. The book charts Frank and Paul’s time together in February 2020, just as a new virus is beginning to threaten the world. But it is a funny book, with Frank and Paul’s dialogue – decades of love contained within – reading at times like a comedy double-act. The four chiseled visages. L to R—Washington (the father), Jefferson (the expansionist), Roosevelt #1 (the ham, snugged in like an imposter) and stone-face Lincoln, the emancipator (though there are fresh questions surrounding that). None of these candidates could get a vote today—slavers, misogynists, homophobes, warmongers, historical slyboots, all playing with house money.

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For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face filled the TV screen behind the honor bar, doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini. I couldn’t take my eyes off him – tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.”

Richard Ford and Lorrie Moore review: 2 literary masters Richard Ford and Lorrie Moore review: 2 literary masters

I had assumed that this one would end with Frank’s funeral, or at any rate, its planning (the novels are written in the first person). But it turns out that it isn’t Frank, by now in his 70s, who lies dying in Be Mine, but another of his sons, Paul, a troubled middle-aged man who, when the book begins, has been diagnosed with ALS, a form of motor neurone disease that is also known in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease, after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it. Richard Ford talks to Alex Clark about his latest novel Be Mine. Ford has written about American life through his character Frank Bascombe for nearly forty years though The Sportswriter to Independence Day and Lay of the Land. This time Frank undertakes a road trip across the country with his son who is dying of ALS - a form of motor neurone disease – and their journey is both tender and tough, filled with wit. Ford discusses his writing, passion for observation and unerring faith in the US political institutions. Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost fortyyears, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived.Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to thegreat American midway. This book is set just before Covid appeared. Ford has an interesting way of showcasing his prose as readers follow Frank glimpsing a television screen…Earlier in the novel, Frank details a relationship he has with Betty, a Vietnamese American massage therapist who he considers marrying and who may or may not seriously consider him as anything more than a reliable client. This may have some point in a five-novel portrait of Frank Bascombe, but in a stand-alone story it really serves little purpose. Resolutely uncynical, blessed with the perceptual gifts of his creator, Frank Bascombe incarnates an old idea of America, now waning; and he knows it. The Mount Rushmore presidents, finally reached, have something “decidedly measly about them […] the great men themselves seem unapologetically apart, as if they’ve seen me, and I’m too small.” If that seems a bit on the nose, well, neither Frank Bascombe nor Richard Ford have ever shied away from the obvious – the obvious being, like everything else, part of the job. Frank is 76 or 77 (it's a bit confusing at times), semi-retired, and with several health problems. But everything else recedes when Frank learns from his sort-of estranged daughter than his son, Paul, 30 years younger than Frank, is dying of ALS. Frank enlists the help of a woman doctor with whom he once almost had an affair and Paul is admitted to the Mayo Clinic, which can't do anything for him. At the end Frank has been living in the basement of his doctor friend. She has rebuffed any suggestion of a romantic relationship, let alone marriage which Frank sort of proposes, but he can stay and they have drinks together, often along with her current boyfriend. A trip is planned– rent a dilapidated RV and make the trek up to the glorious Mount Rushmore with the goal of helping the guys bond while shaking off a painfully claustrophobic walk of death. Father and son look to break down some of the walls neglect has fostered over the years. The question looms…why this destination? What huge significance can a commercial tourist trap like Mount Rushmore be in the comprehension of a life?