Be Mine

Product Information

In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimedliving writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world. I believe I missed out on the nuances that are best known when you have been following a character through their past history. How cruel to keep killing off poor Frank’s children! (Bascombe also has a daughter, with whom he does not get on.) It’s against nature. Why did he do it? Shouldn’t it really be Frank who’s for the chop? Ford’s eyes are a famous shade of aquamarine and they consider me now, rather coolly. Don’t I know, his expression says, how horribly ruthless novelists can be? “I’m such a conventional writer,” he finally says. “I just couldn’t figure out any way that I could have written that book. I mean, I didn’t want to write as a… ghost.” I find it hard to subordinate what’s happening now to anything I would have written about it. Because what’s happening now will eventually have to become subordinate to people’s imaginations, but I don’t feel I have the language for what’s happening now. I wish, in a way, I did. This pandemic is going to produce some wonderful literature. That’s not much of a solace to us, but I wouldn’t even try to apply my thinking about these stories to the situation that’s before us now, because all those stories were framed around a world that’s in jeopardy of never existing again. The stories feel almost quaint. A trip is planned– rent a dilapidated RV and make the trek up to the glorious Mount Rushmore with the goal of helping the guys bond while shaking off a painfully claustrophobic walk of death. Father and son look to break down some of the walls neglect has fostered over the years. The question looms…why this destination? What huge significance can a commercial tourist trap like Mount Rushmore be in the comprehension of a life?

Be Mine by Richard Ford review – America, the fool’s paradise

It’s now a somewhat soiled and tattered abundance, actually, hedged around with dangers. In the Comanche Mall, “as in many public places now – and for perfectly supportable reasons”, Frank feels that “someone from somewhere may be about to shoot me”. The RV rental place Frank visits is called A Fool’s Paradise. This, of course, is what America is. It is also what Frank has always knowingly tried to cultivate. As he says: “The ability to feel good when there’s almost no good to feel is a talent right up there with surviving loss.” The ironies here aren’t cynically deployed. A fool’s paradise may be the only paradise we get.I wrote this book through the worst of the pandemic, and it was a big tincture of melancholy of not using my life fully enough It is perpetually surprising about an impossibly sad subject matter, but it is done with an extraordinary imaginative spirit and a constantly diverting patter that deepens and does not deflect the extremity it explores so masterfully against all odds. Be Mine is a dazzling tragi-comedy about the reality of human torment that is at the same time sane, debunking, fanciful and full of absent-minded lust and daydream while never for a second losing an intrinsic heartbreaking seriousness. All but retired, rooted in Haddam, New Jersey, a town “as straightforward and plumb-literal as a fire hydrant,” Frank has a part-time job answering phones in the office of a “boutique realty entity” with the inspired name of House Whisperers. In the earlier books, he endured the death of his oldest son, age 9; two divorces; prostate cancer; and being shot in the chest—as an innocent bystander—by a punk with an AR-15. All of that, even his beloved Haddam, even the recent death from Parkinson’s of his first wife (Paul’s mother), is shoved to the side by his surviving son’s illness. In Rochester and on the road, Frank and Paul are “alone together, joined unwillingly at the heart.”

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Goodreads

Earlier in the novel, Frank details a relationship he has with Betty, a Vietnamese American massage therapist who he considers marrying and who may or may not seriously consider him as anything more than a reliable client. This may have some point in a five-novel portrait of Frank Bascombe, but in a stand-alone story it really serves little purpose. Much is made of the clinic, its physical layout and its various attempts at raising people's spirits, separate from whatever it can or can't do for them physically. Frank and Paul are united in their rejection of this atmosphere and Frank rents a vehicle, old, large, not quite a camper, for a road trip to Mt Rushmore, where he went with his parents some 60 years earlier. I don't think this is the best book to start reading Richard Ford's novels but this was my first one and was a sort of novice. After high-school football stars were accused of rape, online vigilantes demanded that justice be served.Richard Ford’s Be Mine is a dazzling tragi-comedy about the reality of human torment. Credit: Leonardo Cendamo