Be Mine — Richard Ford’s farewell to his four-decade protagonist

“And we are finally, really almost there,” says Frank Bascombe near the end of this novel. Indeed we are: Be Mine is the last part of Frank’s story, a real-time chronicle delivered to us by Richard Ford over the past four decades.

Ford, now 79, has been at the top of the literary tree — American branch — throughout those decades, having started out with tough, hard-boiled thriller-ish novels. But it’s his later, more literary work featuring Frank Bascombe that has won him readers and awards, from the Pulitzer Prize to the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.

We previously met writer-turned-realtor and cancer survivor Frank in the trilogy of novels The Sportswriter (1984), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006), where he was our reliable narrator to a certain type of happy-go-lucky American everyman life. The clutch of novellas under the title Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) followed — and now here we are, older but maybe not much wiser, at the end. Do you need to read the others first? No, though by the time Be Mine is done with you, you’ll surely want to.

It’s a literary project matched in ambition only by John Updike’s Rabbit series. This time, as in the previous two novels, the loose plot is centred on a special day: after Independence Day and Thanksgiving comes the less exalted celebration of Valentine’s Day, February 2020. It finds Frank, now in his seventies, and his 47-year-old son Paul travelling from their home in Haddam, New Jersey, to see Mount Rushmore.

What we’re ‘here for’, Frank offers, is ‘to give life its full due, no matter what kind of person we are’

The kicker here is that it will be Paul’s final trip: he has been diagnosed with ALS — also known as motor neurone disease — a “fierce and always fatal disease” that will “set loose in him a great, honking, spirituo-psychic crash-in which will sink him. And me as well.”

Yet the greatest ambition of all is that Ford has decided to make this grim material into a bright comedy, and has succeeded. The book opens and closes with sections titled “Happiness”. Could Frank be happier in life? Not for him the response he quotes from Philip Larkin: “No, not without being someone else.” Frank is “happy enough at least to be Frank Bascombe,” and recalls that his mother once asked him if he was happy. He wasn’t so sure then, “but she was on her deathbed, so I said yes.”

The understated comedy of that response is Frank all over. Joking is how he finds his way through the thickets of life: wondering “what causes tragedy to be tragic and comedy comic, and how these two are joined.” He rarely makes a serious point without defusing it through a gag — he tells Paul “that I’d never completely ‘found myself’ — except in the mirror every morning” — or undermining it with qualifications. What we’re “here for”, he offers, is “to give life its full due, no matter what kind of person we are. Or am I wrong?”

He’s not wrong. 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.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot going on: Frank is in the throes of a new relationship, sort of, with his Vietnamese-American masseuse Betty Tran (“At the end of our two hours I rose — not without help”); he muses on the business he works for, the ridiculously named “boutique realty entity” House Whisperers; and he fumbles on through “senior moments” like forgetting what couscous is called on a trip to the supermarket.

But the greatest pleasure is in the dialogue between Frank and Paul, father and son bickering like a double act as they navigate the “compassion consultants” and ever-cheerful nurses who they know haven’t got a hope of even slowing Paul’s decline and death. Paul and Frank’s acceptance of their lot illustrates Dostoyevsky’s observation that “man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything.” “By the time he’s dead,” Frank says of his son’s illness, “he’ll be the world’s greatest expert — as good as his doctors. And as helpless.”

Frank and Paul’s talk is evasive in the face of the unfaceable. “This is how he chooses for us to discuss our hard subjects — as things we don’t say on the way to someplace more important.” When an emotional pay-off does come — as when Paul gives his father a Valentine’s card — it cracks overhead like a sonic boom. “I simply felt terrific about whatever it was because all of it felt true of life,” says Frank, and we can only agree.

It’s the challenge of a writer’s life to know how to end a magnificent series of books like this. In one sense, the inevitable grinding-down of Paul’s illness gives it a built-in pathos, resonance and sense of finality — but there’s a surprise in store that pins the story firmly to our times, while retaining a universal compassion. In the end, what Be Mine reminds us of is what our instincts always knew: that what will survive of us is love.

Be Mine, by Richard Ford, Bloomsbury £18.99/Ecco $29.99, 352 pages

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