I’m not a religious person, but if I were, Frank Bascombe would be my high priest.
He’s the lead character in Richard Ford’s pentalogy, which began with The Sportswriter (1986) and continued through Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and Let Me Be Frank With You (2014), now concluding with Be Mine, published last year.
Frank Bascombe is, I suppose, the quintessential anti-hero. There’s nothing particularly interesting about him; he just floats through life without making much of a fuss. Marriages fail, aspirations quietly fade, American politics grows ever more incomprehensible, ex-wives (and children) die. It sounds gloomy, but it works—there’s something about Frank that keeps me coming back for more.
What that ‘something’ is exactly has eluded me throughout the first four books. With a mounting sense of puzzlement, I’ve noticed how the unfolding of Frank’s life transfixes me, even while seeming almost completely devoid of narrative structure. These stories shouldn’t work, yet they do. They aren’t even much of stories; more like prosaic notes, accounting for an existence that, on the whole, is really rather uneventful.
Still, for some reason, I can’t get enough.
The experience reminds me of certain odours that initially come off as unpleasant but have interesting undertones that compel you to keep sniffing. You’re not sure if you like it or not—just that the sensation captivates you.
This is, I imagine, how religious people feel about ‘God.’ My analogy to Richard Ford as a secular kind of priest is made with heartfelt sincerity.
If Frank Bascombe starts out as a mystery wrapped in an enigma, I feel, however, that this fifth and final book about him provides a cipher that helps interpret the entire narrative. There’s something distinctly recursive at play here, though, because when the decoded message comes out in plain text, it seems to read: Nothing Really Matters.
Or perhaps more accurately: ‘Nothing’ Really Matters.
Here’s what I mean by that—or what I think Richard Ford means by that, or at least what he has Frank Bascombe mean: If we want to say something true about life, we must sacrifice all manners of narrative tricks. The only stories that truly make sense are the ones that don’t look like stories at all. Or, put another way: the true value of existence lies in all the little “sweet nothings” that tend to pass by unnoticed while we’re busy working on the big brushstrokes, trying to make sense of life by dressing it up as a ‘narrative.’
The paradox here, of course, is that Richard Ford is a master storyteller. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have hung on to his every word for thousands of pages, only to be served with the message that all of it has been for nothing.
When I put it like this, it might seem as though the Bascombe books are postmodern or nihilistic (I’m not sure I know the difference), but they’re not. And before you think of putting Frank into the Buddhist basket (which critics love to do), here he is, preemptively striking against such predictable labelling
I cannot completely believe I’ve brought this unlikeliest of moments about, and can be here standing where I’m standing—with my son. How often do anyone’s best-laid plans work out? How often are promises kept and destinations achieved? I’ll tell you. Not very goddamn often. Buddhists profess all is the journey. Abjure arrival. But what do they know? They’re hiding something, like all religions.
What Frank is really saying isn’t that ‘all is pointless.’ It’s that life is pregnant with meaning, but any attempt to capture its essence will be counterproductive. That’s why he detests any kind of ‘narrative,’ whether political or otherwise. (Frank is a lifelong anti-Republican, but that doesn’t make him a Democrat; he has nothing but contempt for ‘liberals.’)
The fifth and final instalment of the Bascombe saga has two protagonists: the ageing Frank and his forty-seven-year-old son, Paul, who has been diagnosed with ALS.
What could be more pointless and disappointing than pushing eighty and knowing you’ll outlive your child? That question is the premise of this book, and the answer it suggests is this: even more pointless would be going on a road trip with said son through rural Minnesota, in a beat-up rental car, in the middle of winter, heading toward the meaningless goal of Mount Rushmore.
See South Dakota and die. Quite literally.
Pretty bleak.
Still, the journey turns out to be deeply meaningful and, somehow, healing. Although, admittedly, Frank would hate me for making just such a statement.
Because he truly has turned into a grumpy old man, and he’s on a vengeful campaign against clichés, especially as they materialise in people’s desire to turn life into meaningful stories. To ‘snatch moral from the jaws of death,’ as it were.
So what is Frank left with, and how is it possible that he fails to convince the reader that his outlook is as pessimistic as it seems?
That question lies at the real core of this narrative, and the answer is extremely nuanced and multifaceted. As with any message worth a damn, it can’t be compressed and therefore can’t be fully conveyed in anything less than reading the full Bascombe pentalogy. Still, I feel inclined to try, and I’ll do so by pulling three quotes from the final book. The first describes an interaction Frank has with his daughter—Paul’s younger sister, Claire:
On the Saturday he died, the Wolverines were not playing, but the Chiefs would play the Chargers the next day and win—which he unfortunately missed. On that morning, his sister told me—the two of them had been having “amazing” talks in the months he was in her house—that Paul’s death , which we’d been told to expect, mirrored the decline of America’s morals and influence on the world, and that his death was a significant symptom. This I hated to hear, since it seemed to steal his death from him, which I told her. She is a Log Cabin Republican (what could be worse for a father?). And even if I could’ve considered what she said (I didn’t really understand it), I could not agree with her. No one’s death is a symptom.
[…]
When they had their amazing talks, she said she finally “discovered him,” and that he was “a surprisingly real and complex whole person”. As if for forty-seven years he had been less than a full entity, waiting only for her notice to render him plausible. For a smart woman—she is forty-five—she often thinks and talks in clichés and rarely sees through to what’s dazzling in life. These qualities, of course, works well in the business world and possibly in psychoanalysis—of which she’s had a god’s own plenty. But they leave much of life unrevealed. Again, she is a Republican, and believes more money’s to be gained by rendering life less interesting.
The second passage I want to quote is from a final glimpse, almost like an epilogue, of what Frank’s life has become after Paul’s death. He’s now living a quiet life, holed up in the guest house of an ex-lover. To fill his days, he’s volunteering to read for the blind at a local library. Mostly, it’s newspapers, but once in a while he picks up a contemporary novel (he was once himself an aspiring novelist). Here’s how he feels about reading them:
These up-to-the-minute literary-fiction choices are ones I admire and thoroughly enjoy reading to blind people, who would never know anything about them otherwise. These young writers, I’ve found, are all brilliant; keenly astute at knowing and saying precisely what causes what in life. What causes our lusts. What causes our guilts. What causes our disquiets and despairs. What causes joy. What causes tragedy to be tragic and comedy comic, and how these two are joined. What you think about it, isn’t that what anyone wants to learn from literature, since knowing such data can initiate for you a practical understanding of true happiness?
[…]
I’d once read in a book about writing that in good novels, anything can follow anything, and nothing necessarily follows anything else. To me this was an invaluable revelation, a relief, as it is precisely like life—ants scrabbling on a cupcake. I didn’t see I had to speculate about what caused what. And truthfully, I believe it to this day. Witness my son’s relentless assault by ALS, which as far as the best medical science understands, poses a near complete mystery. Yes, we see it happening. But nothing specifically causes it or specifically doesn’t cause it. It just happens.
The final quote is from Frank’s last interaction with his son:
In his final week […] Paul sent notes to me via his care team. One message stated that on reflection he had not gained much from our trip across the nation, but that we had achieved something we’d set out to do, which was good per se—though it was too bad Mount Rushmore couldn’t have been closer. He also asked me if I maintained a working definition of what good was—which surprised me, since all his life he’d seemed enviably non-absolutist about most things; reconciled to life’s primarily offering only contingencies, bemusements, sly looks, and the unexamined way being all there is—at best, a momentary stay against confusion. I thought about this question for a while, then gave him the definition I still largely believe—the Augustinian one—that good is the absence of bad, that happiness is the absence of unhappiness. I added that the poet Blake believed good was only good in specifics—which is what we had experienced and enjoyed together on our trip. Details.
***
As I turn the last page of Be Mine I put the book where it belongs, next to its Bascombe-series siblings, on a shelf just over the head of my bed. I like the feeling of them sitting there, watching over me, a warm reminder that, in the end, every little simple thing counts.