Be Mine

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In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimedliving writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.

The New Yorker Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

With new work from Richard Ford, Lorrie Moore and Zadie Smith, plus second novels by Caleb Azumah Nelson and Guy Gunaratne, this is shaping up to be a memorable 12 months It is perpetually surprising about an impossibly sad subject matter, but it is done with an extraordinary imaginative spirit and a constantly diverting patter that deepens and does not deflect the extremity it explores so masterfully against all odds. Be Mine is a dazzling tragi-comedy about the reality of human torment that is at the same time sane, debunking, fanciful and full of absent-minded lust and daydream while never for a second losing an intrinsic heartbreaking seriousness. I’m happy to say that if it hadn’t been for Updike, I probably would never have had the temerity to think that I could write connected books 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.Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful roles--sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent--Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days. The fact of Donald Trump’s election continues, even now, to seem preposterous to him. But Ford believes – or perhaps he only chooses to believe – that his presidency was an interregnum, not the start of a downward spiral. “The republic is fairly ebullient and I don’t think he has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected again. Partly, he’s too old, just like Biden. Partly, he’s probably insane. I think it’s become glaringly obvious to everybody that he’s delusional.” So democracy will endure in the US? “I don’t know the answer to that, and I won’t be here anyway. But I will say that its survival is a whole lot less dependent on who the president is than it is on our position vis-a-vis our antagonists. The fact that we cannot stop this insane war in Ukraine. Americans are taking it as a given that we can’t stop it. And what’s happening with the Chinese. I don’t have much of an idea about that, but I know it’s nothing good. They’re not riven by doubts. They’re not riven by ethical conflicts. And I don’t think we’re in a position to do anything about them.” As he did so often in the earlier novels—especially The Sportswriter, when his sexual magnetism (age 38) was irresistible and his conquests legion—Frank seeks the comfort of a woman’s love. He visits a massage parlor called Vietnam-Minnesota Hospitality, improbably located in an isolated farmhouse 18 miles north of Rochester. His “massage attendant,” Betty Duong Tran, is a diminutive 34-year-old “with bobbed hair … darkly alert eyes … pert, friendly gestures.” Frank takes Betty on dinner dates; afterward, “inside my still-frozen car … we’ve kissed and embraced sweetly a time or two.” The smarmy soft focus is unusual for Ford, but less disappointing than the safe, generic description that accompanies those occasions when Betty—“for reasons I never anticipate”—decides to strip naked for the massage session: “Undressed, she is as tiny as she seems clothed, but unexpectedly curvy and fleshy where you wouldn’t expect.” There is a desperation about Frank’s character that makes him almost unlikable, and I don’t know if that makes him lovable, or not.

Be Mine: : Richard Ford: Bloomsbury Publishing Be Mine: : Richard Ford: Bloomsbury Publishing

This is his 5th book centred on the character of Frank Bascombe. It is touching, heart wrenching, funny, awful, sad, never pitiful and also never cosy. Frank, for all his imperfections in affairs of the heart over the course of his life, is committed to showing up for his dying son, and given the limitations of what is available given the time of year and his sons precarious health, he creates a road trip as a form of a Valentine's gift. Well, because I’m so stupid, it took a long time to get the thing to where it would work. It was cumbersome at first, and then it worked its way to awkward, and then it worked its way to tolerable. At the end Frank has been living in the basement of his doctor friend. She has rebuffed any suggestion of a romantic relationship, let alone marriage which Frank sort of proposes, but he can stay and they have drinks together, often along with her current boyfriend. It’s nearly 40 years since Richard Ford published The Sportswriter and showed in one swoop that America had produced another major writer and that he was not much like anyone in sight, despite his shorter fiction’s affinity with that of his friend Raymond Carver.Once again, Richard Ford has taken a slice of life that we all have or will have served to us at one time or another and finds the authentic pathos. The thing about living this way is that you think nothing of driving 2,000 miles to reclaim something you’ve left behind.” Richard Ford is talking, via Zoom, about his recent move from Maine, in the northeastern corner of the USA, where he lived when I last spoke to him in 2020, to the southern city of New Orleans. Some of the secondary storylines seemed to cut out abruptly but I want to believe it's just part of Frank's rather unpredictable, choppy life. For his part, Ford intends to go on writing, but he’s also at peace with the possibility that whatever is in the tank, words-wise, may not “be anything”. How will he celebrate his big birthday next year? He smiles. “I am a man who generally asks my friends to just shut up and let me spend my birthday quietly. I don’t want people insincerely revving up the engines of their delight. But Kristina has asked me about it, so…” A party? Surely he should have a party. For a moment, he looks at me in a way that makes me feel very young. “Sweetheart, the best word I can think of to describe how I feel about my life is: surprised… Whatever we do, it won’t be jubilant.” Richard Ford remains my favourite author. He captures the mundane inner life of an ordinary Joe, and in the process the reader gains significant insights into America - the country, people, politics, landscape, society, and memorable incidental characters.