Be Mine by Richard Ford
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Be Mine
By Richard Ford
Harper Collins, 2023
Bascombe is back. If you know who I mean—Richard Ford’s character Frank Bascombe—you’ll be happy to have this alert. If you don’t know Bascombe—the protagonist and narrator of four previous novels—you have missed a man way more interesting than that more lauded serial personage of American fiction, Updike’s basketball hero Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom whose life ended in novel four. In a prologue to Be Mine, Ford reminds readers that his non-athletic anti-hero has outlasted Rabbit and survived pretty much intact into novel five. Frank, now 74, approaches at a prep school reunion the former hoop star Rodney “Pug” Minokur, who has, like Rabbit, an animal’s nickname. Always well-intentioned, Frank wants to acknowledge an old favor and, as usual, starts talking to Pug, only to find—“Fool, fool, fool.”—that Pug is gaga and in the care of his grandson.
A few pages later we find this relationship of care inverted: Frank is now wholly responsible for his 47-year-old son Paul who is suffering from advancing symptoms of ALS, sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease though—to keep the sport theme going—Paul is also no former athlete. Father and son have been in Rochester at the Mayo Clinic where Paul was enrolled in an experimental drug study for two months. It is now finished, and not really knowing what to do next Frank suggests they visit Mount Rushmore, where Frank’s parents took him when he was a child. The two-night road trip and preparation for it take up about half of the 342-page Be Mine.
This compression of fictional time and space is a challenge for Ford since Bascombe novels usually advance at a leisurely and sometimes digressive pace with lots of close attention to different locales (since Frank is a realtor) and to various minor characters. But more challenging and even painful is the constant presence of Paul—not just because he has problems swallowing, using one hand, walking, and talking; not just because he is surely dying—but because he is, both father and son agree, an “asshole” that Frank often avoided before Paul needed care. Not a racist or a misogynist or a Republican (a curse for Frank), just “difficult” and irritating in his cultivated and sometimes aggressive eccentricities.
If you are a fan of Bascombe novels, you will probably want to learn how Ford manages these self-imposed challenges (at the age of 79). But Be Mine is no place to begin Bascombe. I suggest Let Me Be Frank, Ford’s previous book which is composed of four long stories, or The Sportswriter, the first Bascombe novel where Frank loses his wife after the death of their nine-year-old son. Then the bigger and best books: Independence Day and The Lay of the Land for Frank’s middle years.
“As I grow older,” Frank says, “less and less seems incongruous.” And yet incongruity is the essence of Be Mine--the incongruity of an elderly father caring for a son whose age exactly reverses the father’s; Paul’s odd and unexpected behavior at his work, in the entertainments he chooses, in his clothing, and in conversations with his father; at least one surprise in Frank’s present life; the incongruities of the American empty, then cluttered landscape through which the Bascombes pass; even the title which has romantic connotations that don’t initially seem appropriate to the book.
Then there’s also realtor Frank’s unexpected reading: at various times he refers to Martin Heidegger and even quotes from Being and Time where Heidegger argued at mind-deadening length that only when accepting death does one live authentically. Since neither Paul nor Frank is accepting (Paul says there should be many more stages than Kubler-Ross’s famous five), much of the novel presents what seems evasive and inauthentic (Paul’s corny intentionally bad jokes, Frank’s playing along with his son’s old routines, the oppressive replications of Interstate commerce). But what Heidegger had in mind was human heroism, overcoming “everydayness.” Paul and Frank are just trying to get through the days and nights together, so even small—incongruous and maybe even inauthentic—surprises of wisdom and good cheer become, I believe, Ford’s reply to the philosopher Paul calls the “old Nazi.”
In his later years before Paul’s onset, Frank has become a “positivist-gradualist,” relatively optimistic and relatively pragmatic (it’s always “relatively” with Frank), so his inconsistent coping with the incongruous in Be Mine is consistent with Frank’s character, but Paul’s terminal illness makes optimism impossible and pragmatism both necessary and difficult. Perhaps near the end of his protagonist’s life, Ford is putting Frank through the worst test of his hard-earned but lukewarm equanimity since the death of his first son. If you are willing to be tested by the novel’s sadness, you can decide for yourself if Frank passes.
He may surprise you. While Paul spends days at the Clinic, Frank is spending some hours at a massage parlor with a Vietnamese/American woman half his age. They even go out on dinner dates, and Frank believes he may love her and wishes they could have sex. But they don’t. After the trip and Paul’s death from Covid (not from ALS, another surprise), Frank lives for some weeks in the California basement of his first and unrequited love. Again, no sex, but Frank thinks about it. Younger readers will probably find that incongruous or just disgusting.
Paul may also surprise by talking about his hope to have sex even though he can barely stand, but the Ford reader and Frank almost never know when Paul is joking or attempting to assume an identity (as he failed miserably to do when trying to be a ventriloquist). Actually, many of his remarks to his father ventriloquize the memes and twist the clichés of popular culture. Paul does seem to be sincerely surprised and pleased by their visit to Rapid City’s Corn Palace in which every kind of kitsch (Paul’s specialty) is made of corn or simulated corn. What Paul’s response is to the four stone-faced presidents I will not spoil.
Frank’s realtor’s eyes register the built landscape with his usual wit and, perhaps, new sympathy in the February cold of Minnesota and South Dakota for reliable brand-name beacons—Marriott, Hilton—amid the small-city sprawl of local businesses and signs. But almost always there are perceptions of incongruity in the settings Frank describes and the people he briefly meets. The Clinic is like a busy international airport where healthy people rush to their next destination. The massage parlor is in an old farmhouse with furnishings left by the former owners. The white woman who rents Frank his RV got together with her Black husband with a Scandinavian name after his daughter was killed and his marriage ended. A motel that could have been in Psycho turns into a place where Frank meets another afflicted man who is married to a chirpy healthy woman. At the edges of Bascombe suffering, care is everywhere. Frank is not alone.
With its compression, Be Mine is like a trash compactor of Americana, just about everything almost all at once. The following passage describing the RV rental business—sandwiched between a “GUNZ shop and an ADULT OUTLOOK” store—represents in miniature the jammed incongruities of the novel:
A Fools Paradise is a roadside emporium we’ve visited once and where one finds for-sale-or-rent golf carts, septic tanks, porta-potties, snowmobiles, cherry pickers, enormous American flags, blank grave monuments, waterslide parts and an array of 25 used RVs set out in rows in the frozen snow.
At the end of Frank’s narration, he says, “I’d once read in a book about writing that in good novels, anything can follow anything, and nothing ever necessarily follows anything else. To me this was an invaluable revelation and relief, as it is precisely like life.” Almost anything can happen in Ford’s novel except, lest one needs to be reminded, recovering from ALS and, except in fictions, getting out of life alive. Frank does goes on. In almost the final words of Be Mine, he says, “`I’m ready for something different.’”
A former pick-up player, I loved Updike’s Rabbit, but I love more Ford’s fiction—the first-person narration from a sensibility wider and finer and less cynical than Updike allows Rabbit. Near the end of Be Mine, Frank states, “Relations, the great master says, never really end,” a paraphrase of Henry James’s “relations stop nowhere.” By writing his five Bascombe novels, Ford has extended relations further than the “master” ever did. And those relations have been expressed with the master’s subtlety and precision even when events became dramatic (as when Frank was shot in Lay of the Land) or traumatic, as in Be Mine. Can, however, a Jamesian novelist find an audience younger than himself (and this reviewer) in TikTok time? Readers who have grown old with Bascombe will appreciate his character challenged—again, as in The Sportswriter!—by the worst that can happen to a parent. If you are young, give Ford a fairer chance to appeal, perhaps The Sportswriter when Frank was not yet forty. The title Be Mine alludes to Valentine’s Day cards since the Bascombes’ trip occurs then. But maybe the title is also a veiled late solicitation from the author. As for me, I am Ford’s, and he is “mine,” my favorite contemporary realistic novelist.
Tom LeClair has published five novels about the same protagonist, Michael Keever.