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Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel Hardcover – June 13, 2023
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From Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford: the final novel in the world of Frank Bascombe, one of the most indelible characters in American literature
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 once more our guide to the great American midway.
Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives—sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent—Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.
In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherEcco
- Publication dateJune 13, 2023
- Dimensions6 x 1.13 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100061692085
- ISBN-13978-0061692086
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Frank Bascombe receives the send-off he deserves in this fifth book of the series, following Let Me Be Frank With You (2014)…It’s a novel about the ambiguities of love and happiness. Frank remains a funny guy, both ha-ha funny and a little odd, but Ford couldn’t be more serious about his craft, his precision, his attention to detail, his need to say exactly what he means. If this is also Ford’s curtain call, he has done himself proud.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Ford masterfully captures the strained dynamic of two men attempting to articulate emotions…Ford’s prose attains a rare combination of exquisite beauty powered by dialogue that has the casual familiarity of a jocular Everyman gifted with a winning, sly wit. Be Mine ultimately charts the journey of the human condition and the strivings, failings, and resiliency of the human heart. A fitting finale to the landmark Bascombe saga, this ranks among Ford’s best.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“If the Bascombe novels endure it will be partly because they serve as such comprehensive documents of the hopes and hypocrisies of the age. But it will also be because of the wonderful voice that Mr. Ford has fashioned for them—jokey, melancholic, dreamy, disagreeable and doggedly hopeful…. They are also works of tremendous craft and arrangement, full of tantalizing patterns and recurrences. In this balance of meaning and meaninglessness there has always been enough mystery to keep Frank occupied for a lifetime.” — Wall Street Journal
“Ford is among the elite American writers of the past half-century.” — Dwight Garner, New York Times
“The startling and poignant conclusion unites father and son through love and grief as they learn to “give life its full due."
— The New Yorker
“Ford has a loud and faithful following among writers on both sides of the Atlantic....Every sentence is considered, yet many look like they’re about to fall apart in their devious careening. Something similar can be said of the meandering Bascombe books, too: Their course, like Frank’s, is uncompassed by design. Every detour offers an opportunity to ponder….The astonishing core of Be Mine is the barbed, tender, despairing bond between father and son.” — Adam Begley, The Atlantic
“[P]lenty of heart and wry humor."
— AARP Magazine
“In true Updikean fashion, Frank gives the mundane its beautiful due, and his narrative — which meanders as his life has — goes back and forward, from here to there and round again, resulting in a book to sit back and wallow in, driven by characters as much as by plot…. It’s the challenge of a writer’s life to know how to end a magnificent series of books like this....In the end, what Be Mine reminds us of is what our instincts always knew: that what will survive of us is love.” — Financial Times
Realism, in these books, is an act of worship, but not complacent worship. John Banville once called Ford “a relaxed existentialist”. It’s true. His is a realism shorn of metaphysical certainties – a 20th-century realism. Ford’s world is contingent, frightening, beautiful, comically manifold. — The Guardian
About the Author
Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada. His short story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Sorry for Your Trouble, Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Kristina Ford.
Product details
- Publisher : Ecco (June 13, 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061692085
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061692086
- Item Weight : 1.09 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.13 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #50,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #678 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books)
- #1,561 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #4,490 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Richard Ford (born February 16, 1944) is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank with You as well as the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Being young and exciting and full of possibility is all there is and all there has ever been in America. Getting old, which we all seem to do at some point, means you have become irrelevant Ford writes about this descent into irrelevancy with great skill.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this last Bascombe novel. Every tiny detail speaks volumes to me living in a small town and nearing the end of my life in the U.S. labor force, and therefore my own vanishing relevancy. All the regrets, the insecurities, the fears, are now all set in stone and unfixable. I can do little except live with them until the inevitable end. Your life is no longer endless future possibility but mostly past regrets, and everything, good or bad, is suddenly behind you instead of ahead, and your time is running out, although you are trapped in the dilemma of being required to behave as if everything matters, your remaining time will never end, the meter is still running, and plans must continue to be made. His son suffers from a fatal disease, yet as unharmonious as their personalities are, the father shares his son's fate as we all do.
But I’ve not yet had enough of Frank. I hope Richard Ford’s not through with him.
Ford's writing -- but somehow I enjoy the following: His compassion, his humour, his assessments of the characters we meet. I'm not a fan of his political stance --
I find it interesting how he seems to be very interested in what his characters are wearing?? Also, what there physical characteristics are -- wow, so very observant~ Still, I still stayed connected to this last novel tho it was very hard to do as his son was not a very interesting character -- and not very likeable despite his als limitations. I wonder too how he has such insight into having children since he doesn't have any?? His romantic relationships seem contrived. I hung in because I was fascinated with ALS and apparently he knows much about it.
Top reviews from other countries
The same casual slant references to Filipinos, Italians, Indians (Sikhs), immigrants in general. All in fun though.
Canadian readers may have enjoyed his 2017 piece (Driving Up) published in the Globe & Mail by invitation. If not see if you can get a copy
Frank is now 74 - life sucks (my opinion).
This is a story about a journey, not the destination.
If you are fragile and Frank’s age - perhaps give this book a miss. Too much relating to its topic will not be good.
There still exists in this book - with its darkness - some of Richard Ford’s wit and intense, incisive dialogue, but having just now finished the book - I’m really, really sad. All of his other books have left me with ‘the stitch’ having laughed so much and so hard.
Give your psyche a check - if you’re AOK - read it. But it’s going to give you heart-ache.
It was hard to stay upbeat while reading it and that my be due to personal echoes of my own life sorrows, but I wanted to see it to the end and valued many of the insights. I gave it four stars because it made me so sad often and I am not sure it is for everyone.