'Be Mine' is Richard Ford's fifth book starring Frank Bascombe, the last in a literary tradition of the Great American Gasbag. And at this point, he's run out of gas.
Now Frank is obsessed with happiness and unsure if he’ll attain it. He suspects he’s always the butt of a joke — from his snarky son, from the unctuous staffers at the Mayo, from the woman renting him an RV for the Rushmore trip. “If three house moves are the psychic equivalent of a death, a son’s diagnosis of ALS is equal to crashing your car into a wall day after day, with the outcome always the same,” he laments.
Not much happens in “Be Mine” in terms of plot — it’s a straight drive west to Rushmore — and what does happen is marinated in Frank’s bemusement and ambivalence. He observes protesters at a mall complaining about Valentine’s Day in a feeble attempt to satirize a woke mob ; witnesses a hostage situation and a bad accident; visits a casino; and arrives at his destination. Bascombe’s America circa February 2020 is more uncertain, and Frank is less on top of it.
This wishy-washiness is Frank’s problem, but also the novel’s. “Be Mine” lacks the forward thrust of the first two Bascombe novels — both classics, however gassy. And it’s all the more frustrating because there are moments throughout the book where Frank’s status as a world-class observer is fully, delightfully intact. The book is studded with pitch-perfect observations of shabby-tacky American everydayness: a hospital waiting room , a casino ; Donald Trump ; life itself .
Early Bascombe novels were overrun with lines like those; now they’re relatively starved for them. A 70-something man ground down by divorce and loss shouldn’t be expected to be in good humor, of course. But it’s not unreasonable to expect fiction to be a lively guide into that feeling of being ground down. Frank tries. Ford tries. But mostly Frank is driving down a straight line in barren prairie land, heading toward his inevitable fate.
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