Seventy-four year old Frank Bascombe, a former sports writer, is at the Mayo Clinic with his forty-seven year old son, Paul, who is undergoing a medical trial for ALS. (Seventy-four and forty-seven, is Paul a mirror of Frank?) Frank decides he will drive his son to Mount Rushmore. Frank rents a RV to accommodate his wheelchair bound adult son for the trip, but knows that the camper has no heat so they will end up staying in hotel rooms during the trip. Much of the novel is conversations between Frank and Paul and Frank's thoughts as he thinks about his own health. The detailed novel is funny and sad as both Frank and Paul think about the end of their individual lives. Richard Ford is a wonderful American writer. Readers who are not familiar with his work should go back to Ford's first Bascombe novel, The Sportswriter, published in 1986, to begin a wonderful journey.

Death, Not Yours

A few years ago, I picked up a copy of “The Sportswriter” by Richard Ford and before I read it, I ordered a copy of his Pulitzer Prize winning “Independence Day.” Once I got into “The Sportswriter,” though, I realized it did not interest me at all. The ramblings of a middle-aged man stumbling through his mid-life crisis seemed to have been done better by John Updike’s Rabbit books. The prose was good, the journey… bleh (to me at the time). With more attractive suitors on my TBR list I never did get around to “Independence Day.”

Recently an advance copy of Mr. Ford’s new book, “Be Mine,” was available and I thought I would give it a shot. I felt I must have missed something, had the wrong attitude. At the same time, I had an extra Audible credit available, and I thought maybe a different format might be the thing to align me with his pacing.

The central character running throughout this series is Frank Bascombe, now 74 and focused on mortality and the puzzle of life. His son, Paul, is 47 and has been diagnosed with ALS, the “Lou Gehrig” disease for which there is still no cure. It is one thing to be playing out your days trying to come to grips with life’s eventual fade, it is quite a bit more challenging to be the one guiding your son to his finale.

Frank drives Paul out to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he will be analyzed and studied, not cured. Paul’s condition is rapidly deteriorating, and Frank finds himself in the role of caretaker, assisting his son increasingly more often in performing his basic functions. The two men are constantly sparring with one another, with a sarcasm and gallows humor both witty and morbid.

A trip is planned– rent a dilapidated RV and make the trek up to the glorious Mount Rushmore with the goal of helping the guys bond while shaking off a painfully claustrophobic walk of death. Father and son look to break down some of the walls neglect has fostered over the years. The question looms…why this destination? What huge significance can a commercial tourist trap like Mount Rushmore be in the comprehension of a life?

Earlier in the novel, Frank details a relationship he has with Betty, a Vietnamese American massage therapist who he considers marrying and who may or may not seriously consider him as anything more than a reliable client. This may have some point in a five-novel portrait of Frank Bascombe, but in a stand-alone story it really serves little purpose.

Advancing age brings with it the examination of what life is all about. Frank had his own concerns, but they are framed much differently when it is his son’s story he is defining. Death has become the undeniable reality and its progress is being measured by Paul’s decline, something Frank cannot ignore.

So, yes… this can be seen as a depressing subject and there is very little in the way of plot movement. I have to endorse the Audible edition by Harper Audio, which I used alternating with the kindle download. Richard Ford’s prose is always witty and clever, but the audible helped to keep things moving. While this was not an easy journey, the questions posed made it a rewarding one.

Thank you to Ecco Books and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #BeMine #NetGalley

This Ford takes a road trip but it's a bumpy ride, due to the passenger in Frank Bascombe's car. That would be Paul, his middle-aged son, who has a terminal illness. Paul is both suffering and insufferable and for me, at least, not black humor-funny enough to offset the pall he casts on this tale. Ford's observations of what passes for humanity are as keen and pungent as ever, but it isn't until the last chapter or two that he gets out of first gear.

Be Mine by Richard Ford may be my favorite book of 2023 (so far) and it has lots of competition as fine writers take on a world and people marked by the pandemic. Having read the previous Bascombe novels as they were publishedI'm torn between recommending that you read them first or dive right in to Be Mine. I'm planning to go back to the beginning and reread. They're that good. Frank Bascombe first appeared in 1986 in The Sportswriter followed by Independence Day(1995), Let Me Be Frank With You(2014) and The Lay of the Land(2006)

I’m just about Frank Bascombe’s age and have been following his narrative since Richard Ford began recording it. Because it extends so far into my reading past, I remember few of the details, so I turned to the plot summaries on Amazon and the reviews posted there. Some of the reviews are elegant analyses of the character of Bascombe and his place in American culture as a metaphor for the ever-changing world.
That is not why I write reviews. I write to give my opinion, to explain what I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy about the book and finally to recommend to the wondering whether to read or run from the book. So with that in mind, here is my take from Be Mine.
I realize all books written in the first person are by their nature narratives encompassing one person’s thoughts, but not all of them come across like the never-ending bloviating of this self-satisfied old man. An introductory description as we enter a casino gives us two paragraphs of every item and activity taking place there. Frank doesn’t just throw something in a trash can; he describes all the items already in the receptacle. We are given inventories of stores and menus of restaurants. These paragraphs are so dense, it is hard to extricate yourself from the words and escape to a section where something actually happens. Frank comes off like a narcissist, barely touched by the outside world. The tragic diagnosis of his son’s terminal condition is depicted matter-of-factly and described, in its relentless progress, as just another manifestation of his son’s rather weird personality. Sadly Frank’s description of his son’s life is heavily weighted toward the lame slogans on his sweatshirts and the too frequent farts erupting from his tortured system, The result is the image of the son is robbed of any dignity in those final months.
I’m sure Ford’s intent was to show us Frank’s view of the world, ,flaws and all, but he comes across as superficial, needy, and not too bright. Is this a metaphor for our world? I hope not, but I’m sure that many readers will disagree with me. Frankly, I wish I hadn’t read this sad commentary — sad, not because of deep feeling eloquently expressed, but because despite all the talking, this was a life barely examined at all.

In his newest novel, Be Mine, Richard Ford writes what sounds like a memoir as Frank Bascombe recounts a car trip with his son Paul. At 47, Paul has been diagnosed with ALS, called “Al’s” in their surprisingly light conversation. Seventy-four-year-old Frank has become the caretaker, though he is frequently interrupted with advice by phone from Paul’s sister Clarice who differs with her father’s decisions. The mother is dead as is a brother who died in childhood.

The reader is taken in with Frank’s account that feels like all the parts of a family car trip. Old family jokes are repeated with both men already knowing the punch lines. Memories are recounted and argued over. They miss signage for the Hilton Garden and Denny’s at exit 412 and then have to backtrack. They find an unsatisfactory motel so they seek another that turns out not to be any better than the first. Paul brings out his puppet Otto to perform his ventriloquism, and the only mouth that moves is his own. Their vehicle is diverted when there is an accident up ahead. Just one more family trip with laughter, arguments, reminiscences, and decisions. Yet, over it all, hangs Paul’s increasing difficulty with movement and the knowledge that up ahead is death.

This book is the newest in a series about Frank Bascombe, but it stands alone is such a way that the reader isn’t conscious of anything missing if she has not read the others. I did need to remind myself occasionally that it was a novel, not a memoir.

It's been a while since I read the four previous works by Ford featuring Frank Bascombe and that have followed him - and his careers and family and marriages and divorces and emotions, holidays, yearnings, America and more - through the years. I can't say I remember them particularly well, but I recall falling into each happily, reading them with great focus, and have each on my bookshelves. Having read this one, which may or may not be the final installment in Bascombe's world, I might very well make it a project to read them all again from the beginning. Here Frank is now 74, working in real estate part-time, mostly a desk job, living alone, when he learns from his daughter that his son, Paul, with whom he's had an uneven relationship, has ALS. A road trip, as the other novels include, is featured here, once Paul has gone through an experimental drug program at Mayo. This is not laugh out loud funny, but the views are amusing, droll, the nature of America precise, the relationship between father and son true, and it was a pleasure to take this latest trip with Frank.

Thanks to Ecco and NetGalley for an ARC.

In this mostly dark, yet insightful novel, Richard Ford shows his great strength as a philosopher and observer of the world. Lawrence Bascombe returns in his late years. At age 74, he has lived through various careers, two marriages , and the loss of a young child., and now suddenly finds that his 47 year old son, Paul, has been diagnosed with ALS.
What follows is a mid winter road trip from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where father and son commune and grow to know each other, the trip being more about bonding, thought process and memories than sight seeing.
Beautiful prose along with a final ray of hope for survival and the future make the darkness not as bleak as I had expected. Finally, the demons you know are not always the ones to get you in the end.
Four stars for a literary masterpiece that is at times a little slow but always a worthwhile read.
My thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review b

Published by ‎ Ecco on June 13, 2023

Thrillers and other genre novels often follow a character who stars in a series of novels. Literary fiction has fewer recurring protagonists. Off the top of my head, my favorites are Jim Harrison’s Sunderson, John Updike’s Rabbit, and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe.

Bascombe was a sportwriter when he debuted as a protagonist. He later became a real estate salesman. Now he’s retired and thinking about death. Not so much his own, although at 74, “with a modest laundry list of ailments and sorrowing memories,” he knows his end is approaching. He thinks about his mother’s lifeless face, about a son who died at the age of 9, about the death of a former wife, about friends who have passed away. But mostly he thinks about his son Paul, who has ALS (“the bad kind”) and will soon stop breathing. Frank knows “there aren’t many chances left to do things right.”

Paul is 47. He has always been annoying and a mild asshole, or at least Frank has seen him that way, probably with good reason. Paul is unfriendly, sloppy, snarky, and alienated. He makes unfunny jokes with his ventriloquist’s dummy but he moves his lips, making him a failure at comedy. Approaching death hasn’t improved his disposition. Paul has always taken an unserious approach to life. In that regard, he is closer to his father than Frank would like to admit.

On the other hand, Paul loves puns and quirky language. He asks whether steeple jacks are all named Jack, whether civil servants are always civil, whether daredevils are really devils. He views life in relative terms, as “contingencies, bemusements, sly looks, and the unexamined way being all there is.” Frank always thought Paul was an odd boy who would grow up to be normal. It never happened and now it never will.

Frank fears that he has been less supportive, less loving, than he should have been during his son’s life. Since he refers to his son by such terms of endearment as “dimwit,” it is easy to understand those fears. Frank doesn’t like his son much but, to be fair, he doesn’t like his daughter either. Frank numbers Paul’s faults — the number is high — and chides himself for wondering how this man can be his son. Yet Frank’s strongest experience in the face of his son’s illness is helplessness.

The plot takes Frank on a journey to Minnesota so that Paul can participate in a clinical trial for a new ALS drug at the Mayo Clinic. Frank decides to rent an RV and take Paul on a father-son trip to Mount Rushmore, perhaps not the wisest destination in February. It’s a late and lame attempt at bonding time, but Paul goes along with it because Paul goes along with everything.

Paul fills the trip, as he has filled his life, with snarky commentary. The highlight for Paul is the Corn Palace. It’s particularly suited to his desire to embrace the absurd. A place where he can buy corn sunglasses is his idea of Heaven. He appreciates Mount Rushmore because it’s “completely pointless and ridiculous.” Frank feels the same way about the monument, creating a bonding moment — one of the few he’s ever had with his son. He thinks it is better to bond over the ridiculous than to bond over approaching death. Frank believes that growing old is “like having a fatal disease, at least insofar as I’m no more ready than my son to give up on comfort, idleness, and taking grave things lightly.”

Ford paints a mesmerizing and sometimes dismal portrait of the landscape, small towns, billboards, tribal casinos, and oddities of South Dakota. “There are scarcely towns at all — land and sky merging at a far distance, stitched by a jet commencing the polar route.” Rapid City is a “soul-less splat of mini-malls, tower cranes, franchise eats, car purveyors, and new banks” — in other words, a cocondensed version of Los Angeles.

Ford introduces motel owners, tourists, waitresses, and the other people everyone meets on a road trip, making the kind of connections that occur when Americans “conduct an earnest but inconsequential exchange” with a stranger. One stranger admits to being from New Jersey; the other describes something that happened to him in New Jersey. It’s not a great connection, but it’s a connection, a reminder that we’re all part of the same plot.

The novel is haunting in its honesty. Frank’s reaction to his son’s death is almost nihilistic. He doesn’t see his son as a hero for clinging to life (not that Paul makes much of an effort). Frank refuses to wish that Paul will live an extra hour or day or month because he knows that the wish would be futile. Frank views continued existence as a product of luck, or something genetic, something we don’t understand and mostly can’t control. He is happy that his son will die within a year after his symptoms begin, as other sufferers of ALS endure a much slower death, living as a mind trapped in a body that over a period of years loses its ability to move, to speak, and eventually to breathe. There is nothing good or bad about death; it’s inevitable. Only the circumstances can be graded on a relative scale.

The novel ends with a discussion of “true happiness”: how young writers try to define it and tie it to its causes, joining it to guilt and tragedy. Frank finds it a waste of time to worry about causation; most causes are obvious, at least in retrospect, but that knowledge has limited value when planning a lifelong road trip to happiness, given the detours that cannot be foreseen. As an old man, Frank’s best road to happiness is one that is free of worry and planning. Sleep, eat, enjoy encounters with beauty. Sit on a couch. Walk a dog. Don’t think about how life will end, lest you make the ending more difficult than it needs to be.

Along those lines, the book’s most important message is summarized in its final pages: “that the most important thing about life is that it will end, and when it does, whether we are alone or not alone, we die in our own particular way. How that way goes is death’s precious mystery, one that may never be fully plumbed.” It amazes me that such a depressing story about two seriously flawed people can be so enriching, but over the years, I’ve come to expect amazement from Richard Ford.

RECOMMENDED

Four stars for 'Be Mine' by Richard Ford. This is the final book in Ford's series of Frank Bascombe, which started with 'The Sportswriter' in 1986. I've long had a love/hate relationship with Frank, and a mostly love relationship with all of Ford's work. He showed me the power of 'modern' literature, and introduced me to the Vintage Contemporaries in the 80s and 90s.
This is Frank's final chapter, in which he finds himself the caretaker of his 47-year-old son who has ALS. With two failed marriages behind him, and another child who died at nine, Frank decides to take his son Paul on a road trip to Mount Rushmore. But it's also a trip back and forth in time - where Frank reflects back on his life, and forward on his future.
Nothing much happens in the book, yet in a way, everything happens. It made me think back on the people in my own life, and ahead to what I will make (hopefully) of my remaining years. The writing is Richard Ford-wonderful (a bit stream of consciousness), and there is much to love about this story. I may not love Frank, but ultimately his story is one of forgiveness, so I forgive him for being human. Isn't that what we would all want for ourselves?
(thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC, the opinions are my own)

Frank, age 74, becomes his son Paul’s caretaker. Paul has ALS and after going through treatments Frank, our narrator, takes him on a difficult journey to Mt Rushmore. Their relationship, although fraught with issues, represents their unique way of expressing love. Philosophies of life, death and afterlife, if there is one, are provokingly explored. Be Mine is a very thoughtful read.

Be Mine by Richard Ford is a highly recommended literary novel and the fifth one featuring Frank Bascombe.

Frank, 74, is dealing with his own aging when he finds himself becoming the caretaker for his son Paul, 47, who has been diagnosed with ALS. They start their trip in freezing Rochester, Minnesota, where Paul is part of a study at the Mayo Clinic. The two decide to take a field trip for Valentines Day and travel in the winter through MN and SD to Rapid City to see Mount Rushmore. The two are both facing their own mortality while trying to create the happiness they can with what they have.

While the prose can soar and showcases the intelligence and insight that Ford is known for, this can also be a depressing novel. Certainly there are entertaining and funny parts, but the over all tone is melancholy. The narrative is told through Frank's point-of-view and he is a contemplative man, reflecting on his life, mortality, thoughts about happiness and the events transpiring around him. He remains a totally unique character in literature.

The Frank Bascombe novels are all centered around traveling during a holiday. For those who may want to read all of them The Sportswriter happens around Easter, Independence Day occurs around the 4th of July, The Lay of the Land is set during Thanksgiving, and Let Me Be Frank With You transpires during Christmas, and Be Mine takes place around Valentine’s Day.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins via NetGalley.
The review will be published on Barnes & Noble, Google Books, Edelweiss, and Amazon.

Since Richard Ford created him almost 40 years ago, Frank Bascombe has become his literary alter ego, in the same vein as Roth's Zuckerman or Updike's Rabbit. And as with Larry McMurtry's Duane Moore, what started out as a standalone novel has expanded into several sequels as Ford has found more and more issues to address. Now in his 70's, Frank is once again on a roadtrip with his son Paul with whom he first meandered in the Pulitzer winning Independence Day, but now Paul is 47, and Frank is his caretaker since he has ALS (or Al's, as they call it).

So dealing with his own ailing body as the ever increasing needs of a person with that fatal uncompromising condition, Frank thinks it a great idea to go to Mount Rushmore on Valentine's Day in a rented camper. What Ford does so well is delineate life's ludicrous incongruities, usually through the skewed lens of Paul's perceptions. The conversations between these two men, addressing matters of life and death interspersed with observations on the midwest landscape they traverse ("I am tantalized, as always, by the dense life elsewhere, though smart enough not to breathe its fumes too deep.") (On the Corn Palace: "Macy's of corn-themed crapola.") A visit to Fawning Buffalo, an Indian-managed casino, had me laughing out loud. But the real strength of the book lies in its depiction of grief and its sublimation. As Ford muses, "Can grief be defeated, or merely out-lived?"

What a wonderful and heartbreaking book. Richard Ford, it must be said, is one of my favorite authors and the Bascombe books are always interesting but this book is his best since Independence Day. In a lot of ways it had echose of Rabbit, Run by John Updike as well. I look forward to getting book out to folks.

For readers who have been following the exploits of Frank Bascombe since his character was introduced in the mid-1980s, the story that unfolds in Be Mine, the fifth installment in Richard Ford’s celebrated series of Bascombe Novels, will come as little surprise. To begin with, the tale once again involves traveling somewhere in the country on a holiday—Valentine’s Day, in this case—coming after earlier books set around Easter (The Sportswriter), Fourth of July (Independence Day), Thanksgiving (The Lay of the Land), and Christmas (Let Me Be Frank With You). More importantly, we are immersed in the ruminations and exploits of an interesting man as he enters yet another stage of his life. This installment finds Frank aged well into his seventies and working only occasionally in the real estate career that has defined him professionally for several decades.

As in the previous volumes, the story here is told from Frank’s point of view, allowing us a first-person perspective on what he is thinking and feeling. He is an insightful, if complicated, guy who is not always likeable as he deals with the myriad losses in his life—a failed writing career, the dissolution of two marriages, the tragic deaths of loved ones. Through it all, though, Frank remains optimistic and resilient about his prospects for the future, even as he sometimes derails those opportunities with his own actions. In Be Mine, that resilience is again put to the test as he learns that Paul, the 47-year-old son with whom he has a fraught relationship, has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of ALS and is not expected to survive for long. Frank leaves his New Jersey home to become Paul’s caregiver as he undergoes treatments at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Most of the integral action in the book then centers on Frank’s effort to pull off a feel-good, bonding road trip with Paul to visit Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.

It does not seem quite correct to use the word “enjoyment” to describe the experience of reading a Bascombe novel. Like its predecessors, the tale laid out here has a morose undertone that can be depressing at times—most of the time, in fact—and, if truth be told, the main character is not really the Everyman he was probably intended to be. Certainly, Frank is not someone who thinks or acts like anybody I know. Nevertheless, the writing in the book is so strong that it is easy to overlook any lapses in how the plot unfolds. Ford is truly a craftsman as a storyteller and he has created, with compassion and profound insight, one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction. This may well be the end of the line for this series (although I have been wrong about that before as the Bascombe Trilogy became the Bascombe Quartet and now the Bascombe Quintet). If so, Be Mine is a poignant and fitting sendoff that leaves Frank still looking cheerfully, if realistically, for better things to come.