Coetzee all pop up-not names Harry would ever drop.īut the key difference between a Rabbit book and a Bascombe book is the texture of the prose.

In Be Mine, “the old Nazi Heidegger,” “that scrofulous old faker Faulkner,” and the novels of J. Frank has always had an expansive range of highbrow references. College-educated Frank is white collar all the way: a short-story writer, a sportswriter, a college professor (very briefly), then a real-estate agent. Until he got rich as a middle-aged Toyota dealer, Harry was unequivocally blue collar. Too ruminative, too intellectual to be an everyman (“Never my intention,” Ford once declared), Frank is nonetheless an accurate and specific witness to the American ground on which Ford stoutly stands.įrank is different from Harry physically (in high school, Frank was hopeless at basketball), morally (you won’t catch Frank in flagrante with his daughter-in-law), and socially. While graciously acknowledging Updike’s influence (“Anything I might’ve learned from him I gladly concede”), Ford has taken care to distinguish Frank from his precursor.

View Moreįollowing in Rabbit’s zigzag footsteps, Richard Ford’s recurring character, the endearing, occasionally exasperating Frank Bascombe, steers what he calls his “uncompassed course” through the sequence of novels beginning with The Sportswriter (1986) and stretching to Be Mine, the fifth and probably final book of Frank. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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