Independence Day at Summer's End

8/30/2011

Everyone knows the Fourth of July is the beginning of the end anyway, so it feels no less fitting to have finished Richard Ford's second Bascombe novel a week before Labor Day than it would've had I read it over the July 4th weekend, as I'd originally promised David Goldfarb.

In Independence Day, Frank Bascombe of The Sportswriter is still divorced but no longer profiling football players for a glossy magazine in New York (i.e. Sports Illustrated). It's 1988 and he's now a residential real estate agent in his adult hometown of Haddam, New Jersey, full of wisdom on home-shopping, -thinking, and -buying that has me more convinced that ever that renting is the way to go:

"Buying a house will, after all, partly determine what they'll be worrying about but don't yet know, what consoling window views they'll be taking (or not), where they'll have bitter arguments and make love, where and under what conditions they'll feel trapped by life or safe from the storm, where those spirited parts of themselves they'll eventually leave behind (however over-prized) will be entombed, where they might die or get sick and wish they were dead, where they'll return after funerals or after they're divorced, like I did...Sometimes I don't understand why anybody buys a house, or for that matter does anything with a tangible downside."

If 1988 was an uncertain time, I can only imagine what Bascombe would make of 2011. (Fun coincidence: 2011 and 1988 align perfectly, with July 4th falling on a Monday.)

After two 450-page novels, Bascombe is still something of an enigma to me, full of (like so many men in American fiction) private poetic musings but less-than-forthcoming conversation, mislabeled (according to him) by nearly everyone he meets. And he meets a lot of people. In the course of this book's three-day holiday weekend, he has substantial encounters with his angry mixed-race renters; a picky, middle-aged, white Vermont couple who've been looking to buy a home for months; the manager of a hot dog and root beer stand in which he is part-owner; his tall, beachfront dwelling girlfriend whose husband disappeared years prior; a black truck driver in a motel parking lot where someone has just been killed; his beleaguered, richly remarried ex-wife; his good-humored, over-achieving daughter; his depressed and possibly bipolar son; a party girl chef at a Cooperstown B&B; and his Jewish ex-step-brother who's done well for himself in the flight simulator business. Not to mention the several past relationships he meditates upon and the dozens of insubstantial encounters at pay phones across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, the details of which are recorded impressively, even at times ecstatically, but with a precision too precise to be believed. They frequently left me exhausted.

Meanwhile, Frank keeps a running tally of all those false monikers: "In three days, I've been called a burglar, a priest, a homosexual, a nervous nelly, and now a conservative, none of which was true. (It was not an ordinary weekend.)" And yet it's hard to blame anyone for misunderstanding Frank, lodged as he is in his dreamy Existence Period, as even he himself admits.

There's so much to take away from this East Coast holiday tour, but for now, it's the exquisite descriptions -- some of them plot-centered, many just generously observed -- that are staying with me. The darkened ocean on a Jersey shore. A preteen daughter flopped on a Connecticut lawn. A helicopter lifting off from a hospital in the Catskills. Parachuters descending upon a village green. Only a writer as confident and skilled as Ford would use "blameless" to describe the light on a day for which our narrator (rightly) feels himself to blame. It is the sort of perfect, surprising, moralizing word, one of many in this book, that together turn a story about the world in which we live into an original vision of that world -- a vision, like that of Bascombe's hero Emerson, well worth engaging.

3 Comments

Matt

8/30/2011 11:54:36 pm

OK, so I wasted a few minutes reading various lit essays and blog posts on Ford. I didn't have the patience to wade through the entirety of this too-enthusiastic, too-philosophical appreciation of the Bascombe trilogy (http://www.readysteadybook.com/Article.aspx?page=mitchelmoreonford), so I'll just excerpt the passage I found most interesting:

"Like many other readers back in the late 80s, I was very taken with Bascombe’s voice. Indeed, reading those words again this summer prompted a nostalgic reverie. I recalled that it was like a layer of bluff and deceit had been removed from fiction. No more wild imaginative flights of fancy, I thought, no more card-shark plot teasings, no more broad canvases “taking on” the 20th Century. Instead, a voice from beyond defeat. I was so taken with its desolate stoicism that I read The Sportswriter three times in as many years. There was an irony in such returns.

'If there’s another thing sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendant themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough. The other was a lie of literature and the liberal arts.'

I returned because Frank Bascombe’s voice promised a transcendence of fiction. After all, it’s fiction’s basic promise: to give meaning to one’s life. As one reads a book or watches a film, that is what one enjoys, the illusion of meaning. But sooner or later it ends and one is exposed again to blank freedom. One can divide readers of modern fiction into two groups depending on the response to this experience: those who “devour” books so that blankness is elided for as long as possible; or those who wish books could include that experience of the “blank” in the work itself. Richard Ford certainly includes it. Frank Bascombe’s disillusion with the pleasures of the imagination defines the person he has become, the story he has to tell and the way he tells it. But of course his condemnation of literature is still literature. It’s one of the most celebrated examples of recent years. It still promises meaning. The irony gives the trilogy its uncomfortable dynamic. In principle, Frank Bascombe could write on and never stop. Every moment of his day can be described in detail. Literature is Frank’s useless freedom; he drifts, bobbing up and down on an endless ocean. To criticise him for bloating his narrative is insensitive to his predicament."

This makes Ford more of a meta-literary provocateur than I would like to believe, but it also captures something essential about the momentum-draining, plot-sickening interruptions and their relationship to his view of life and literature. It's powerful, but I think from a philosophical and an aesthetic perspective I'm in the other camp -- with the 'devourers' of distraction. Because I don't, ultimately, think that fiction/art/history is just some kind of threadbare covering for life's blankness, or should be viewed that way. It is life itself! Something to celebrate and exalt and drink up rather than merely Exist alongside with. Right?... Right?...

8/31/2011 12:41:05 am

Oh, and here's the inevitable James Wood verdict. Interestingly, he seems to prefer The Sportswriter. But there are some lovely appreciative sentences in this review:

WHAT ARE the perils of ordinariness? How do we savour it in fiction without condescension, yet accommodate it without boredom?

When a novelist uses an "ordinary" character to narrate his novel - as Richard Ford uses the thoroughly ordinary Frank Bascombe in both The Sportswriter and its new sequel - he plays with two flames: that he will make his narrator more interesting than is plausible, or that he will make him less interesting than is likeable. The first is a kind of patronage. The writer loads his narrator with the novelist's own literary fruits. The narrator then sees the world as the novelist sees it: too acutely. (Rabbit Angstrom, in John Updike's Rabbit novels, sees the world with Updike's visual sensitivity; one is always uncomfortably aware that Updike is bestowing a literary voice on his not -very-bright Toyota car salesman). The second is a kind of gratitude, as if the novelist were thanking his narrator again and again for being so thoroughly himself. The novelist, mimicking his narrator, thickens his narrative with too much ordinary flour.

The Sportswriter was a fine book for all sort of reasons, but one of its high achievements was its cutting a path between these two fires. Ford never condescended to or second-guessed his meekly ordinary narrator, the sportswriter, dreamer and aimless womaniser Frank Bascombe. Yet Frank was rarely boring, for all his representative averageness. The fit between novelist and narrator was tight. In particular, Ford caught beautifully Frank's life of small accommodations, his sad happiness - a theme lent to Ford by Walker Percy in his novel The Moviegoer (to which Ford's novel is indebted): "it is not a bad thing," writes Percy, "to settle for the little way, not the big happiness but the sad little happiness . . . "

In The Sportswriter, Frank Bascombe's world is at once dreary yet magical, and Ford knew exactly how to balance these qualities in the novel's viscous yet charged atmosphere. Frank likes to list his ordinary pleasures, and Ford allowed them to breathe their ordinariness while also exhaling a finer vapour: "a night-time drive to get dinner at a state-line roadhouse, in which you cruise through hills and autumn-smelling woods and feel almost too cold before you're home. A phone's sudden ringing on an Indian summer night when insects buzz, but you have expected it. The sound of a car outside your house and a door swinging closed . . ." Frank, ex-writer, ex-husband, but a stubborn lyricist, sees life as both full and simultanously empty. This is a tremendous danger for a writer, since fullness and emptiness might merely cancel each other. Yet Ford balances Frank's philosophical stereoscope perfectly. Walking in Detroit, Frank reflects, typically: "Tonight would be a good time get some things thought out. But I have nothing to think out."

In that novel's sequel, Frank Bascombe is chafing a little harder against life; he has a metaphysical rash. It is now seven years since his divorce, and he has bought his wife's house in leafy Haddam, New Jersey. He has given up sportswriting, and is now in real estate. His wife has remarried and moved their two children to Connecticut. Frank is recognisably the same man as the narrator of The Sportswriter, with the same lazy beneficence - "a human being, as untranscendent as a tree trunk," as he describes himself here. But there are differences. Ford's prose was relaxed yet poetic and pointed in The Sportswriter. In his new novel, it is so loose that it is almost falling off the page: "I'm sure Paul would pay big money to spend two free-wheeling days out here with Karl, cracking jokes and double-entendres, garbaging down limitless root beers and Polish dogs and generally driving Karl nuts." This is typical. Ford's long sentences loop and gargle their way through the book. There is perhaps a gain in verisimilitude - the novel reads as if Frank were speaking to us - but a loss in compulsion. There is too much information about real estate.

And just as Ford's prose has relaxed, so his surrogate, Frank, sees the world a little more heavily, with less precision. Frank tends to trade in the known; to refer to what already exists. Again, this seems entirely plausible, but it is possibly a mistake for a novelist. "A stout, aggressive little bullet-eyed, short-armed, hairy-backed Bob Hoskins type of about my age" is Frank's characteristic portrait of one of his clients, the difficult Joe Markham. At such moments, the world does not exist to be torn into novelty, but to be knowingly slapped around a little. We do not really see Joe afresh; we see Bob Hoskins, for that is Frank's reference.

And sentimentality, one of the bent arrows in Ford's very full quiver of talents, is never far away. Of course, there are good and bad kinds of sentimentality, and much

8/31/2011 12:43:26 am

Part 2 of Wood's review (I got it through LexisNexis from a 1995 issue of the Guardian, so I can't just post a URL):

And sentimentality, one of the bent arrows in Ford's very full quiver of talents, is never far away. Of course, there are good and bad kinds of sentimentality, and much of Ford's tousled lyricism depends on the good kind. But Frank's extra years have encouraged his tendency towards sententiousness. He likes to philosophise about things. Indeed, as in Ford's last novel, Wildlife, almost every character in this novel likes nothing so much as to sit down and smooth life into soft aphorism: "Life seems congested to me. Just suddenly tonight. Does it to you?" "Do you feel sometimes that no one's looking out for you any more?" "It just seems to me like a lot more things need explaining these days, Frank."

And yet. There are passages and characters that only Ford could have created. Frank's boss, old Mr Schwindell, who smokes Pall Malls and sucks air from an oxygen cylinder, or Joe Markham, a little bull of mid-life frustration, wonderfully evoked. Or one of Frank's colleagues, Shax Murphy, a "blue-blazer Harvard grad in his late fifties" with a love of William Carlos Williams.

Ford has lost none of that aural tenderness which fills his novels with the whine of traffic, the chink of ice in tumblers, the hiss of cicadas on a warm New Jersey night. His talent for noticing lonely separateness, things loosed from the flow, the lonely bounce of isolate sounds and the snatched vision of a man alone, is matchless. He has rightly been compared to Edward Hopper in this regard. One recalls the man in a vest hanging out of a New York apartment window at the end of The Sportswriter. At the end of this book, Frank sees a man leave a town hall, stand on its steps, light a cigarette, and stand "drinking in the smoke and considering the evening's sweet benefactions . . . I felt envy for whatever he might've had on his mind at that instance, the mere nothing-much of it . . . " One has to search a little harder in this new book for these moments. But what does a little middle-aged bloat and a slower rhythm matter, if such perceptions are still to be found? Richard Ford's many readers will reflect that the sublime variegation of Ford's world, its sad little happiness, demands that the numinous is mixed with the immanent, the lyrical with the ordinary.

Independence Day at Summer's End

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