The Nature of Things

I don't usually read memoirs. Perhaps I have an unreasoning prejudice against them born of some reading experience in my distant past, but, generally, I just don't enjoy them. But I will always make an exception for Richard Ford. Ford has written this short (less than 200 pages) memoir of his parents and of his experience growing up with them. It essentially consists of two long essays written some thirty years apart in time.  Both were written after his parents' deaths. The one about his mother was written first, although she was the second one to die. The second one about his father was written many years after his father died in 1960. Ford was only sixteen years old at the time. In the book itself, the essays appear in the order of the deaths, so the one about the father is first, followed by the one about the mother. We learn that Richard was an only child and his arrival was a bit of a surprise for his parents. They had been married for fifteen years when he was born. ...

Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford My rating: 5 of 5 stars "Love isn't a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts." - Frank Bascombe's meditation upon visiting his ex-wife We thought we'd heard the last of Frank Bascombe in The Lay of the Land , published in 2006 and the last in what was billed as the "Frank Bascombe trilogy." But it turns out that Frank wasn't finished with us, or, perhaps more accurately, Richard Ford wasn't finished with Frank. And so we get a fourth Frank Bascombe book. Lucky us. Each of the three previous books were focused on a particular holiday and this one continues that tradition. This time we are in 2012. Hurricane Sandy has hit and devastated the East Coast, including Frank's New Jersey. We are now several weeks past that tragedy and coming up on Christmas. It's a Christmas that Frank had hoped to host as a "festive family fly-in to ole San Antone" where he looked forward to visi...

Dell Parsons, a 66-year-old soon-to-be-retired high school English teacher in Canada, looks back at his life and tells its story. In particular, he tells of the two defining and cataclysmic events that happened when he was fifteen and that set him on the road to his life that would become. Parsons' voice is a flat, laconic, stream-of-consciousness type story-telling that is deceptively simple. You read a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and think, "Huh, not much there." Then you read on and suddenly it grabs you and you begin to see the significance of that bland sentence pages back and just how it fits into a whole that is greater than its parts. This is the work of a writer who knows what he is doing, who is, in short, a master of his craft. The first paragraph of Richard Ford's book, Dell Parsons' story, is a hook. First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, si...

One of the great joys of my life as a reader is discovering a wonderful writer that I had not read before. That's happened to me several times within the last year, and one of my favorite discoveries was Richard Ford . It's not that I was unaware of Mr. Ford, who has been a superstar in the American firmament of writers for many years now. But I had just never gotten around to reading him. Finally, last year, I read his Frank Bascombe trilogy: The Sportswriter , Independence Day , and The Lay of the Land . From the first pages of The Sportswriter , it was clearly evident to me what all the shouting was about. The man can write! He has a love of language and of finding just the right word for expressing what he wants to say that shines through in every sentence. It was also clear to see why the second book in the series, Independence Day , had won all those prizes. It is still the only book ever to have won both the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner awards. For a couple of weeks now...

This is the final of Richard Ford's three books featuring his character, Frank Bascombe. In the first book,  The Sportswriter , the action took place around Easter, and I found Bascombe to be a not very appealing character. In the second book,  Independence Day , the action revolved around that eponymous holiday, and I began to understand and have a bit of fellow feeling for the main character. Finally, in this book, my conclusion is that Frank Bascombe, like most of us perhaps, is as good a person as he  can  be and that he  strives  to be a good person and to live a moral life. With all his weaknesses and failures (with which I can perfectly empathize!), Bascombe seems a person worthy of our sympathies and his life has some positive lessons for the reader. We meet Frank here at a crisis in his life. His second wife has left him when her first husband, who was thought to be dead, turned up alive, and she felt that she must return to him. His two children a...

Frank Bascombe is no longer   The Sportswriter .   Independence Day   takes place about seven years past the events of that book. Frank and his wife, Ann, divorced in the aftermath of the stresses caused by the death of their first son. Ann subsequently remarried and moved to Connecticut with their remaining two children. Frank bought her old house in Haddam, New Jersey, and, in selling their former family home, leveraged for himself a career in residential real estate. It's a job that he likes and is good at. He has made some wise investments and some would say he is sitting pretty.   But Frank hasn't been able to fully move on with his life. He has a girlfriend but can't completely commit to her because he still sees himself with Ann. Complicating matters is their 15-year-old son who seems to be experiencing an emotional and psychological crisis which threatens prospects for his future. On an Independence Day weekend, Frank plans to take his son on an excursion to ...

My home state of Mississippi is one of the poorest in the country and is problematic in many ways, but one thing it has always been rich in is writing talent. Each generation in turn seems to produce at least one or two extraordinarily talented writers. Richard Ford is one of the ones from my generation. For years, my husband had been trying to get me to read Ford's books and I finally decided that this would be the summer that I would read his Frank Bascombe series. The Sportswriter is the first in that trilogy. Frank Bascombe is the sportswriter. He tried his hand at writing fiction but gave up after one book and took a job with a sports magazine. It's a job that seems to fit him. He likes the traveling. He likes talking to athletes. He likes meeting people who know how to be "within themselves." Frank doesn't really know how to be within himself but he aspires to learn. The sportswriter is actually a very conventional, middle-aged, middle class white male with...