Spring 2007 Edition, Kingfisher Journal
Continued from page 1.)
The Sportswriter review
http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2006/ford-the_sportswriter.htm
Ford's novel is plotted
as are our lives; a week or so at a time, usually important days. In this
case, it's Easter, and after a graveside visit with his wife, Frank has two
spots in his calendar. He's got an interview with an injured sports figure
and a dinner with his girlfriend's family. But Ford's novels don't play out
as a series of events, so much as a story told by a friend, with all the
windings and anecdotes that a friend might toss into their story of a
holiday week. We'll go back to Frank's son's death, because it is ever there
in his mind, we'll meet he and his wife in better times, and we'll noodle
about the back yard with the neighbors. Yes, you will get a very memorable
holiday dinner with the Arcenaults, Frank's outgoing gal and her parents.
But you'll also detour through some meetings of the Divorced Men's Club and
the upshot of these will echo after the novel is finished. Ford's version of
a plot, as it were, is that we live our lives not in neat sequence, but
muddle about through rumpled memories, artfully arranged. The art of Ford's
plot arc is that you notice neither the art nor the plot. You live the life
and feel it as if it were yours.
With characters as big as Vicki Arcenault and voices as powerful as Frank's,
it's important to note the unnamed, never referenced character that drives
'The Sportswriter' – the American suburb. Ford's triumph with this novel,
and the Frank Bascombe novels that follow, is a carefully honed portrait of
a landscape as well as the characters who move through it. Ford explores the
suburbs with no agenda other than to show them as they are experienced by
those who live there. By presenting the reader with a voice so closely
followed, a life so clearly lived, Ford enables the reader to experience the
bland and the beautiful, the sleazy and the surreal in a first-hand manner.
Frank is a creature in his natural habitat, and the reader will be as well.
You may not love everything you see, and you may not see everything you see
in your own suburb, if indeed you live in such an environment. But you will
indeed understand the allure of the life lived in these neighborhoods as
well as the aversion.
Independence Day review
http://shs.starkville.k12.ms.us/mswm/MSWritersAndMusicians/writers/Ford.html#rev1
The Lay of the Land, best review to date , "Intimations of Mortality," by A. O. Scott of The New York Times.
see also
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679454687
The following plot summaries are drawn from Random House promotional literature and other published summaries:
With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that ten years later—after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—was hailed by The Times of London as “an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.” Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to life’s endless complexities than ever before.
Independence Day by Richard Ford is a powerful and
exhilarating novel. The book is a sequel to The Sportswriter.
The narrator, Frank Bascombe, a former sportswriter, is divorced and lives
in Haddam, New Jersey. A real estate agent, Frank is going through what he
calls "the Existence Period." Meanwhile his ex-wife, Ann, has married
Charley O'Dell, an architect . She is now Mrs. Charley O'Dell of 86 Swallow
Lane, Deep River, CT. Both his children live there too, though as Frank
says, "I'm not certain how happy they are or even should be" (p. 7,
Knopf edition). Frank's
15-year-old son, Paul, is an emotionally troubled teenager who faces a court
date for shoplifting.
The novel begins on a Fourth of July weekend as Frank is trying to
close a house sale. Frank's clients, the Markhams, are an indecisive couple
from Vermont who are not satisfied with anything. "The house I could show
them all fell significantly below their dream" (p. 39). Actually, the Markhams
never really want to buy a house; they just want "reality to set in."
Just as Frank is ready to spend his evening with his sometime lover,
Sally Caldwell, he receives a message from his ex-wife. It turns out that
Paul has whacked his stepfather in the jaw with an oarlock. Frank decides to
take Paul for a father-son trip to visit the Basketball Hall of Fame in
Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,
New York. The trip at first is quite successful as Frank tries to get his
son to regain his interest in life and forget about all the troubles. "It's
totally relevant--in my view--to Paul's difficulty in integrating his
fractured past with his hectic present so that the two connect up in a
commonsense way and make him free and independent rather than staying
disconnected and distracted and driving him crazy" (p. 259). Tragedy soon hits,
however, as Paul gets knocked in the eye by a baseball going 75
miles-per-hour. Frank states, "Paul . . . turns his face to the machine,
which, having no brain, or heart, or forbearance, or fear . . . squeezes
another ball through its dark warp . . . and hit my son full in the face and
knocks him flat down on his back with a terrible, loud thwock "(p. 361).
Even though he is a good father, Frank is reluctant to have a solid
commitment with the women in his life. "'And you're noncommittal . . .
You're smooth and you're cautious and you 're noncommittal. That's not a
very easy combination for me'" (p. 272).
The novel stresses the idea of personal independence. Both Frank and
Paul try to obtain independence from the nightmares which hold them captive.
Frank has gone through a son's death, a divorce, and the ruin of his
sportswriting career. Similarly, Paul has to face his parents' divorce, the
death of his brother, and the death of his dog, Mr. Toby. The book itself,
however, is lengthy and exhausting. It is perfect for someone who has a lot of
patience and time. Independence Day is an astonishing novel.
The Lay of the Land. The story resumes in the autumn of 2000, when
Frank's trade as a realtor on
the Jersey Shore is thriving, permitting him to revel in the acceptance
of “that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery
like any ordinary person’s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how
my kids turn out, becomes what the world—if it makes note at all—knows
of me, how I’m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before
whatever there is that’s wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly
hauls me off to oblivion.” But as a Presidential election hangs in the
balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him along
with crises both marital and medical, Frank discovers that what he terms
the Permanent Period is fraught with unforeseen perils: “All the ways
that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like
poppies.”
A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forget—at once hilarious,
harrowing, surprising, and profound. The Lay of the Land is
astonishing in its own right and a magnificent expansion of one of the
most celebrated chronicles of our time.
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