Let Me Be Frank With You and the Literary Magic of Richard Ford

 

 

 

LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU (2014)

By Richard Ford

HarperCollins, 238 pages.

★★★★

 

Welcome to another book from my recent book fair shopping extravaganza. Richard Ford has long been a favorite of mine, though I confess his fiction is often on the cranky white male end of the literary equation. Lots of writers have alter egos, most famously Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”) and John Updike (Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom); Ford’s is Frank Bascombe. In earlier books, Frank has been a sportswriter, a grieving parent whose oldest son has died, a divorcee, and a New Jersey realtor, but in Let Me Be Frank With You he’s a 69-year-old retiree in a happy second marriage. His greatest desire is to empty himself of his past and pretty much everything else that bothers him or requires effort.

 

This novel’s cover features the skeletal remains of the roller coaster at Seaside Heights, New Jersey, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In a case of the (not-so) great American pastime of historical amnesia, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy has faded from collective memory, but if you lived on the Eastern Seaboard anywhere from Jamaica to Ontario, Sandy took out power, produced floods, killed 254 people, and left billions of dollars of damage. (Remember footage of Vermonters kayaking along Montpelier streets by the State House?)

 

Frank was lucky, as a few years earlier he sold his Sea-Clift waterside dream house to Arnie Urguhart when made an offer he could not refuse. Frank hadn’t spoken with Arnie in ages before getting his request to come to Sea-Clift and advise what should be done with the remains of the house and ruined property. Despite the fact that Frank closed his realty office years ago, he is badgered into telling Arnie he’d be lucky to get $500,000 for the land.

 

What he doesn’t tell Arnie is that he has no desire to rekindle old clients or friendships, and that even being asked for an opinion is more mental effort than he cares to expend. Let Me Be Frank is not a novel in which much happens, rather a journey inside Frank’s thought bubbles. If you will, it’s an internal war between what Frank says and what he thinks. It’s a breezy read divided into four sections: “I’m Here,” “Everything Could Be Worse,” “The New Normal,” and “Deaths of Others.” Ford pared down themes to unleash Bascombe to be Ford’s mouthpiece for his opinions on scores of random subjects. They’re not really unrelated, rather they show us Frank (Ford) carries a lot of mental baggage for a guy who allegedly wants to unburden.

 

For those who might wonder why they’d wish to be part of some old guy’s rants, I offer this: There’s a reason that Richard Ford was a Pulitzer Price winner. He is a literary stylist, has an enormous vocabulary, and knows how to walk the tightrope between pathos and bathos (though parts of the books are quite funny), satire and maliciousness, awkwardness and overly mannered, and intrusion and genuine interest. Through it all, Frank at least thinks his mind, even when he feels the pull of social constraint not to speak it. I leave it to readers to determine whether Frank is disingenuous, disengaged, cowardly, intellectually lazy, or sensible. I will say, though, that the “Everything Could Be Worse” section is an incisive look at white liberal guilt. It unfolds when an older black woman rings Frank’s doorbell. Frank twists his liberalism into knots into how to deal with a woman whose family used to live in Frank’s house in Haddam when his neighborhood was black working-class rather than upwardly mobile white middle class. Frank parses his conversation, but is never sure if what he said was the right thing or unintentionally offensive. Through it all we can tell that he is working too hard to prove he’s not a racist.   

 

In many ways Frank is a fraud, but he knows and feels that. There is an air of toxicity in his attempt to be civil to his ex-wife, who is in a memory care unit; or attend the deathbed or a guy he only pretended to like.  Frank is either frank with himself or the kind of jerk he believes others to be. Again, it’s up to the reader to decide, though Frank wouldn’t care one way or the other! But the prose… the boldness… the style… Ford is a writer par excellence.

 

Rob Weir