Be Mine: A Frank Bascombe Novel

By Richard Ford

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.

Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful roles—sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent—Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.

In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on display the prose, wit and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimed living writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781443470438

Richard Ford

Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada. His short story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Sorry for Your Trouble, Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Kristina Ford.

Reviews for Be Mine

[browner56 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For readers who have been following the exploits of Frank Bascombe since his character was introduced in the mid-1980s, the story that unfolds in Be Mine, the fifth installment in Richard Ford’s celebrated series of Bascombe Novels, will come as little surprise. To begin with, the tale once again involves traveling somewhere in the country on a holiday—Valentine’s Day, in this case—coming after earlier books set around Easter (The Sportswriter), Fourth of July (Independence Day), Thanksgiving (The Lay of the Land), and Christmas (Let Me Be Frank With You). More importantly, we are immersed in the ruminations and exploits of an interesting man as he enters yet another stage of his life. This installment finds Frank aged well into his seventies and working only occasionally in the real estate career that has defined him professionally for several decades.As in the previous volumes, the story here is told from Frank’s point of view, allowing us a first-person perspective on what he is thinking and feeling. He is an insightful, if complicated, guy who is not always likeable as he deals with the myriad losses in his life—a failed writing career, the dissolution of two marriages, the tragic deaths of loved ones. Through it all, though, Frank remains optimistic and resilient about his prospects for the future, even as he sometimes derails those opportunities with his own actions. In Be Mine, that resilience is again put to the test as he learns that Paul, the 47-year-old son with whom he has a fraught relationship, has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of ALS and is not expected to survive for long. Frank leaves his New Jersey home to become Paul’s caregiver as he undergoes treatments at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Most of the integral action in the book then centers on Frank’s effort to pull off a feel-good, bonding road trip with Paul to visit Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.It does not seem quite correct to use the word “enjoyment” to describe the experience of reading a Bascombe novel. Like its predecessors, the tale laid out here has a morose undertone that can be depressing at times—most of the time, in fact—and, if truth be told, the main character is not really the Everyman he was probably intended to be. Certainly, Frank is not someone who thinks or acts like anybody I know. Nevertheless, the writing in the book is so strong that it is easy to overlook any lapses in how the plot unfolds. Ford is truly a craftsman as a storyteller and he has created, with compassion and profound insight, one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction. This may well be the end of the line for this series (although I have been wrong about that before as the Bascombe Trilogy became the Bascombe Quartet and now the Bascombe Quintet). If so, Be Mine is a poignant and fitting sendoff that leaves Frank still looking cheerfully, if realistically, for better things to come.