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.
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