Mr. Ford’s tendency to write in chin-stroking proverbs has brought him critics...but what’s important is less the truth of these utterances than the extent to which Frank relies on them. In Mr. Ford’s hands, clichés become koans, simultaneously resonant and hollow depending on one’s fortunes at the time, and to Frank they double as sound, practical counsel and bitter jokes ... Mr. Ford has written these books in the first-person present tense. The immediacy of the narration not only communicates Frank’s moment-to-moment bewilderment, it leaves him unvarnished and exposed, deprived of the luxury of sanitizing impressions that might make him look bad ... But these weaknesses, however exasperating, are vital because they help to make Frank a convincing and three-dimensional everyman ... A wonderful voice ... The Bascombe books are unquestionably faithful to randomness, to the great human accident of existence. They are also works of tremendous craft and arrangement, full of tantalizing patterns and recurrences. In this balance of meaning and meaninglessness there has always been enough mystery to keep Frank occupied for a lifetime.
A change from the earlier Bascombe books that Paul, though never handed the narrator’s mic, so fully shares the stage with Frank. The novels have bustled with ex-wives and girlfriends and colleagues and house hunters and the younger Paul, but they’ve never been as close to a two-hander as this one is ... Readers are in the position of nonstop — if one-way — conversation with him, frequently passenger-side in the car as he surveys his surroundings. It’s not surprising that fans of the books often talk about enjoying Frank’s company ... While Updike’s series gained strength, if anything...there’s more a sense of diminishing returns with Frank, a hazard of his consistency perhaps. (Even good company can start to wear.) Still, I was glad to be with him again in Be Mine, and if he’s less vital these days, doesn’t he know it.
Be Mine is not unlike a welcome late-evening phone call, two scotches in, from an old friend. Ford’s readers have been through a lot with this man ... And yet ... Be Mine isn’t shoddy, exactly, but it’s the thinnest and least persuasive of the Bascombe novels. The seams in these books have begun to show ... There’s a long, odd, uncomfortable interlude in Be Mine during which Frank falls half in love with a much younger Vietnamese woman ... The Bascombe novels have never felt especially up-to-date, culturally. Not everyone cares about pop culture, and Frank has a right to be among those who don’t. But what culture Ford does tuck into Be Mine feels random and unlikely ... God forbid he loses his sense of humor, but to paraphrase late-career Leonard Cohen, I want it darker.
Ford hides himself away and lets the inescapably, unstoppably logocentric Frank tell his tale in his own distinctive, discursive voice, a roving 'I' addicted to description and speculation. Every Bascombe book is full-on Frank ... If you’re up for a dazzling, acutely painful 342-page monologue from a 74-year-old whose favorite shoe is a Weejun, who likes to rhapsodize about suburbia, and who is right now preoccupied with an unspooling tragedy on a road trip through a tranche of Trump country, Be Mine is just the ticket ... The astonishing core of Be Mine is the barbed, tender, despairing bond between father and son ... Every sentence is considered, yet many look like they’re about to fall apart in their devious careening.
Ford’s tough, beautiful prose grew flabbier, and his famous lead’s narration more aimless and irritable. Now, in Be Mine, reportedly the last Bascombe novel, the decline seems complete ... Ford is a formidable writer, and there are lines in Be Mine that sing...but they are overwhelmed by the book’s defects.
Frank’s observations are more persistently downcast ... Not much happens in Be Mine in terms of plot...and what does happen is marinated in Frank’s bemusement and ambivalence ... Wishy-washiness is Frank’s problem, but also the novel’s. Be Mine lacks the forward thrust of the first two Bascombe novels ... A 70-something man ground down by divorce and loss shouldn’t be expected to be in good humor, of course. But it’s not unreasonable to expect fiction to be a lively guide into that feeling of being ground down. Frank tries. Ford tries. But mostly Frank is driving down a straight line in barren prairie land, heading toward his inevitable fate.
A heart-wrenching story that also abounds with wit. Ford has plied his latest novel with some of the smartest repartee around ... The novel is a meditation on life and death, on happiness in the face of mortality, that is, by turns, irreverent, poignant and droll ... This may be one of the funniest sad books, with its unrelenting elemental quandaries.
It becomes clearer and clearer that these are, indeed, books about happiness as a project of conscious denial ... Resolutely uncynical, blessed with the perceptual gifts of his creator, Frank Bascombe incarnates an old idea of America, now waning; and he knows it.
If it all sounds a little drab, it's not. Ford is, as ever, a deeply skilled prose stylist, infusing the quotidian with a kind of muscular grace. In his hands the normal feels new, the mundane extraordinary. If Be Mine is a bit smaller and less given to vintage Bascombe rambles than its predecessors, that feels right, given the way that aging can shrink one's world.
As usual the 'action' proceeds by peristalsis, with descriptions of roads, shops, real estate, traffic jams, motels, tourist attractions and free publications constantly interrupted by long, unwieldy flashbacks to all the stuff that’s happened since the last Frank Bascombe novel. It’s immersive stuff: reading these books is the closest you’ll come to being stuck in an actual traffic jam without leaving the comfort of your armchair ... I wonder whether a) people arrive at these books predisposed to favour fiction that showcases the mundane and b) the swathes of mediocre prose slip under the radar because it’s basically quite easy to read ... If you like the boring bits of Knausgaard and Ford, I can’t argue with that. But I’m still going to try to persuade you not to read Be Mine, for several other reasons. First, there’s nothing novel about this novel ... Why this boorish, boring also-ran is taking up fresh shelf space in 2023 is a mystery.
This compression of fictional time and space is a challenge for Ford since Bascombe novels usually advance at a leisurely and sometimes digressive pace with lots of close attention to different locales ... Be Mine is no place to begin Bascombe ... Frank’s realtor’s eyes register the built landscape with his usual wit and, perhaps, new sympathy ... About everything all at once.
Do you need to read the others first? No, though by the time Be Mine is done with you, you’ll surely want to ... the greatest ambition of all is that Ford has decided to make this grim material into a bright comedy, and has succeeded ... It’s the challenge of a writer’s life to know how to end a magnificent series of books like this. In one sense, the inevitable grinding-down of Paul’s illness gives it a built-in pathos, resonance and sense of finality — but there’s a surprise in store that pins the story firmly to our times, while retaining a universal compassion. In the end, what Be Mine reminds us of is what our instincts always knew: that what will survive of us is love.
Ford’s prose attains a rare combination of exquisite beauty powered by dialogue that has the casual familiarity of a jocular Everyman gifted with a winning, sly wit. Be Mine ultimately charts the journey of the human condition and the strivings, failings, and resiliency of the human heart. A fitting finale to the landmark Bascombe saga, this ranks among Ford’s best.
Throughout his Bascombe books, Ford has always set the particulars of what's going on in Frank's life against a larger American story ... If Be Mine is indeed the last Bascombe novel, it's an elegiac and wry finale to a great saga.
The book is composed largely of delightfully odd, everyday encounters, as Paul and Frank go about their messy business as patient and carer, in a tone and manner suffused with what Frank calls 'a low-grade sensation of randomness' ... Ford remains the laureate of the American middle-class middle-man, the Bascombe books a chronicle of the American Century, an era now perhaps drawing to a close. 'I am aging,' Frank says. 'I have aged. I have come of age. I am agèd. I have reached a great age (but am not, myself, great).' Frank is indeed aged; but he is, himself, great.
Appealing ... These pages are steeped in melancholy, and for the most part Ford’s prose stays within the speed limit, neither soaring nor stalling, though he stops the reader cold with the occasional startling insight.
Frank remains a funny guy, both ha-ha funny and a little odd, but Ford couldn’t be more serious about his craft, his precision, his attention to detail, his need to say exactly what he means. If this is also Ford’s curtain call, he has done himself proud.
