Independence Day
By Richard Ford
Knopf, 451 pages, $24
Richard Ford’s engrossing new novel, “Independence Day,” is, according to its publisher “the long-awaited sequel” to Ford`s “The Sportswriter” (1986), though that novel did not seem to cry out for, or promise, a sequel. “Independence Day,” most assuredly, does.
“The Sportswriter” was one of the few successful attempts to “break out” a literary writer, give him a larger audience immediately; and this was accomplished by publishing the novel as a trade paperback original, skipping entirely a hardcover edition. It worked; “The Sportswriter” was widely reviewed, though it received somewhat mixed notices.
Then, in 1987, came the publication of Ford’s collection of short stories, “Rock Springs.” It was as if the vices some had detected in the novels (for instance, great minor characters and troubling major ones) became virtues in the short stories, which often are a matter of vivid minor characters. The praise heaped on Ford was unstinting and deserved.
“Independence Day” is Ford’s fifth novel, following the largely unheralded “Wildlife” (1990), and with it Ford begins to resemble–given that “Independence Day” is a sequel (and, most likely, a prequel)–a perhaps unlikely model, John Updike and his Rabbit series. Frank Bascombe, former sportswriter and short story writer, five years older since we last left him, is becoming Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, though Harry in the later phase of the Updike pentalogy, the upper middle class Harry of “Rabbit Is Rich.” “I live happily if slightly bemusedly in a forty-four-year-old bachelor’s way in my former wife’s house at 116 Cleveland, in the `Presidents Streets’ section of Haddam, New Jersey,” Bascombe reports.
There are crucial differences, of course, which seem to be generational. One of the most striking is the narrative voice Ford uses in both Bascombe novels–first-person, present-tense, a point of view both contemporary and peculiar. Each novel covers only a handful of days, which allows for a good bit of past-tense recollection, but the present tense is there, annoyingly in your face.
Ford apparently wants us to accept a first-person, present-tense narrator as a new convention. I find it hard to swallow, though, especially when the narrator is a lapsed writer, as Bascombe is, who keeps telling us (“my long-ago and momentary life as a writer”) that he won’t be taking that up again. What does he think he’s doing? He’s not talking to himself.
Both “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day” are in the long novelistic tradition of the memoir form. But this form in the present tense amounts to a voice-over narrating the everyday, an outpouring of one’s immediate thoughts and responses. And a number of times it presents the reader and Ford with ludicrous situations (Bascombe narrates jauntily when occurrences depicted should leave him speechless–or at least, for a moment, at a loss for words) that then color one’s reaction to Frank and the entire novel.
How one reacts to Frank will dominate one’s opinion of “Independence Day.” (Readers of the earlier novel will find no slackening of his charms.) He’s popular with the ladies, has the kind of looks most everyone finds appealing, is glib and more than presentable and fell into enough money (from the movie sale of his one and only collection of short stories) to be upper middle class at the beginning of the 1980s.
The divorce from “X” (as she was called in “The Sportswriter,” now Ann, though no explanation is given for the new lack of reticence) has not reduced his circumstances (Ann has married someone older, richer than Frank, has custody of their kids and is well housed on the shore in Connecticut). And Frank has now found a faux intimate profession that suits his voyeuristic tendencies: He sells real estate, expensive homes, though the boom has softened in 1988, the time of the novel, the July 4 weekend of the Bush-Dukakis election campaigns.
Late in the novel, when one of Ford’s wonderfully sketched minor characters, a former neighbor of Bascombe’s, pops up, Frank is led to speculate, “Carter, I’m positive, couldn’t tell me where I was born, or when, or what my father’s job was, or what college I attended.” A very careful reader might be able to fill in some of the blanks on that list, but it serves to remind us of how little we know of Bascombe’s life before marriage–while his hollowed-out childhood contributes to the vacancy that seems to exist at the heart of Frank’s character.
Arriving at his mid-40s, Frank has reached his “Existence Period,” one of the themes of which is “that interest can mingle successfully with uninterest in this way, intimacy with transience, caring with the obdurate uncaring.” Frank finds it easier to draw a bead on others rather than himself because he contends he is not “a man who believes life’s leading someplace.” In his way, he strives to be ordinary, to be an everyman, though that seems to be more Ford’s problem (in the sense that Ford the writer is not ordinary but wants his literary offspring to be a regular guy).
But it’s hard not to like Frank–who wouldn’t like someone who makes fun of “Democracy in America” (“a book I defy anyone to read who is not on some form of life support”) and people who have spent too much time in “addlebrained Vermont–picking berries, spying on deer and making homespun clothes using time-honored methods.”
There are many pleasures to be found in “Independence Day.” The first 90 pages or so of house selling will be instructive and entertaining to most anyone, and Frank’s wise cracking is often tartly wise. But, like Updike via Rabbit, it is the author’s portrait of America as it and his protagonist evolve and change that Ford fixes so well.
Frank might make fun of Tocqueville, but that is what we get throughout “Independence Day”: what democracy looks like in America, the ’80s in summation, the country palpably alive. Indeed, what distinguishes Frank as an American with a capital “A” is his love of life, energy, things and, however trammeled, his own freewheeling thoughts and his atavistic impulse toward independence.
There is not much story to recount (though there is a profusion of events). In “The Sportswriter” Frank’s oldest boy, Ralph, has died in childhood of Reye’s; in “Independence Day” the remaining son, Paul, now a teenager, is menaced by life and Frank’s indifferent parenting. There is a visit with Frank’s latest girlfriend, Sally; with his ex-wife, Ann, in Connecticut and a brief encounter there with his young daughter.
Race and class make interesting appearances. Minor characters are murdered, and a major character badly injured, but none of those strings is tied up. Perhaps they are there for the next go around. (There is a propensity for violence in Frank that flares up a couple of startling times but is not acted on; it might be if Ford takes him into the 1990s.) And, given the various strengths and virtues of this novel, I’ll be waiting, this time, for the next one.
