Do Please Stand Up Please

“My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sport­swriter”—Richard Ford started quite simply about his Everyman in The Sportswriter, then 38 and growing older with him in Independence Day and Lay of the Land. Frank Bascombe is now 68, retired, a cancer survivor, “enjoying The Next Level of life—conceivably the last”, in Let Me Be Frank With You, but as bewildered and tormented and more-questions-than-­answers about life as he was in his late 30s. What’s with aging authors? Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress recently was a searing take on this phase of life, of senior citizens who are high-strung, bubbling with passion and still struggling with relationships; Ruskin Bond introduces his new collection of writings in The Book Of Simple Living saying, “What have I learnt after eighty years on planet earth? Quite frankly, very little. Dear reader, don’t believe elders and philosophers. Wisdom does not come with age.”

Like Stone Mattress, Ford’s book too can be read as one novel or four separate stories where the characters criss-cross over chapters. Bascombe wanted to be a writer but gave it up mid-life to become a successful real estate agent who is thinking and erudite, goes to greet soldiers returning from Afghanistan or Iraq, can’t stand the Republicans, has voted Obama twice but is not sure if he did the right thing and lives in a quiet New Jersey suburb, Haddam. Quiet, till Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012, blowing away his old house. The friend who bought it from him wants Bascombe to come down and take a look (“And like a pilgrim at Agra, I am struck by my former house’s stationary-ness, a wreck held in place only by its great weight”), which is the opening episode, I’m Here. Ford had said he will not do another Bascombe book but was compelled to change his mind by the destruction Hurricane Sandy brought to the area which he has chronicled in such detail.

The next, Everything Could Be Worse, is a haunting and devastating critique of present-day American life: a black woman knocks at Bascombe’s house when his wife is away, saying she has lived in the house as a child. As they start chatting and she goes around the house, an ominous air starts to build up ending in a terrible tragedy the lady talks about that shattered her childhood. Ford uses his sparse and distilled writing to chilling effect. In The New Normal, Bascombe goes to meet his ex-wife, a new sufferer of Parkinson’s, who has moved into a home close to where he stays, and deliver a special orthopaedic pillow to her as a Christmas gift. Ford’s observations on aging in this story are heartbreaking and true. In the last, Death of Others, one of Bascombe’s friends from the past suddenly calls him, saying he is dying.

There is a tone of finality about Let Me Be Frank With You—it’s clear there will be no more Frank Bascombe novels. This leaves the reader with a keen sense of loss—that there will be no more of Bascombe’s witty, incisive and wise take on the way we live now—that it’s almost like how the thoughts of a close friend or relative who has recen­tly passed away keeps lashing at you in series of torrential waves.