Let Me Be Frank With You

Many thought that Richard Ford's third Frank Bascombe book would be the last, but a fourth emerged last year with the almost comically bad title Let Me Be Frank With You. Fortunately, the book is much better than the title, finding Ford's Bascombe to be retired from selling real estate, beaten the prostate cancer he had in the last book, and getting through a series of days a few months after Hurricane Sandy.

Bascombe is, like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, a white male whose chronicles show a slice of American life over a tetralogy. In Ford's case, those books cover more than thirty years, from The Sportswriter to Independence Day to The Lay of the Land to now this one. Each one finds our hero at a stage of life that is kind of a plateau--the death of a child, being a divorced father, working at a business, and then approaching the end. What's great about Frank Bascombe is that he's great company, at least as a reader. As a husband and friend he can be kind of a dick, but he's so fucking funny and shares such interesting observations that we already knew to be true but had never said aloud, such as: "How many old acquaintances, neighbors, former teachers, fellow marines have we all caught a glimpse of in an unexpected place and dived in an alley rather than face for a second?"

Let Me Be Frank With You (oh, I hate that title) is really four short stories, all narrated by Bascombe as he deals with issues about loss and mortality. The first has him meeting with the man who bought his house on the Jersey Shore (Frank had sold it and moved back to Haddam, a thinly-veiled replica of Princeton, eight years previously). Frank, of course, dodged a bullet, as the house is a complete loss after the storm. The buyer wants Frank's advice, but coaxes him out to see the house, and almost implies that it's Frank's fault.

Next is Frank back at home at Haddam, and a black woman at the door. Turned out she lived in the house before, and wants to tour it. Frank is agreeable, and realizes this happens all the time. But she has a darker story--her father killed her mother and brother in the basement of that house, where she can't bring herself to go.

The third story has Frank visiting his ex-wife in a nursing facility, since she has Parkinson's disease. He feels a duty to her, as they shared three children (including one buried in a nearby cemetery who died as a child) but he can't stand almost anything about the visit. He describes her current beau thusly: "Buck's a large, dull piece of cordwood in his seventies, given to loose-fitting permanently-belted trousers, matching beige sweatshirts of the kind sold at Kmart, big galunker, imitation-suede shoes, and the thinnest of thin pale hosiery. Somewhere, someone convinced Buck that a sculpted "Imperial" and a pair of Dave Garroway specs would make him look less like a Polish meatball, and make take him more seriously, which probably never happens." There's a lot to love and contemplate in that passage. Yes, Frank's a snob of a sort, but so funny that you can't help but chortle in chorus with him, and that Ford drops a reference like Dave Garroway, who no one under fifty (really sixty, though I know who he was) would get. It's beautiful but challenging.

The last story has Frank shamed into visiting a dying old friend, and it's a horror for him from beginning to end: "Misery, I've learned, doesn't really love company, just like nature doesn't abhor a vacuum. Nature, in fact, accommodates vacuums pretty well."

Frank's dying friend has a deathbed confession to make, which Frank doesn't know what to make of. He finds comfort, after fleeing the house, or running into an oil-truck driver who he knows. The continuation of life, never ceasing, no matter who dies or not.

I have no idea if this it for Frank Bascombe. He's 68 in this book, so perhaps we'll see him again in his seventies. I hope so.