With Be Mine, Richard Ford gives us the fifth and final instalment of his Frank Bascombe novels. Bascombe, now in his 70s, suffering aching joints and dizzy spells galore, is ferrying his rapidly dying son through February’s bitter cold to Mount Rushmore for one final, intentionally absurdist trip.
If this book is about anything, it’s death. Frank seems to conclude, as always, that life is merely a series of events unified only by one experiencing them. This also provides an explanation for the structure of the novel. One understands very clearly that Ford is considering how best to end the life of his beloved character. In this way, the novel is decidedly meta (it’s a journey, after all) and thus a nod to the postmodern world into which Frank was birthed. But it’s also tongue-in-cheek meta, because this is 2023: Frank’s reading a “pocket Heidegger” that he vaguely references throughout, although he also claims to carry it because it’s guaranteed to send him straight to sleep. Much of the life-and-death philosophising in which Frank indulges is hokum, as one would expect (the character being an emotionally stifled realtor, not a philosopher). He muses: “A great man said that everybody knows what light is, but it is difficult to say what light is. This goes double ditto when the subject is not light but darkness.” Except, of course, we can all say what darkness is: the absence of light.
Minor moments of bogus philosophising aside (which perhaps I only mention in the hope of stirring one of Mr Ford’s famed enraged responses), this book offers a fitting end for Frank Bascombe, one of America’s best-loved characters. There’s a plethora of allusions here to fit the voracious, puzzle-loving tastes of Big Significant Novel readers (there’s a whole Ulysses hole I nearly fell into: Bemidji, Lestrygonians and Tommy Moore being the death-themed connectors). But, more importantly, it’s occasionally insightful, moving and, best of all, genuinely funny. The book regularly skewers both Republicans and the hyperliberal left, as when, faced with protesters outside a cinema, someone says: “I guess you can protest two goats fucking if you want to.” Reading Be Mine, I felt overwhelmingly relieved to see a return to satire, in place of the usual modern earnestness.
