A visit with Richard Ford’s fictional doppelganger, Frank Bascombe, continues to provide insight into the ever-changing American middle class, their hopes, dreams, and frustrations. Narrator Richard Poe is a gifted interpreter of Ford’s vision, with his sonorous tone and casual but engaging pacing. This latest check-in with Frank depicts the ordinary frustrations of life that everyone has to deal with, mixed with the disheartening and inevitable problems of growing older. Poe’s subtle narration is filled with nuance, along with a nod to both the character’s and the author’s maturation. The conclusion, the summing up of all that has happened to Frank, boils down to a universal truth that all of us find out if we live long enough. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book
Narrated by Richard Poe
Richard FordUnabridged — 6 hours, 23 minutes
Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book
Narrated by Richard Poe
Richard FordUnabridged — 6 hours, 23 minutes
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Overview
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
A brilliant new work that returns Richard Ford to the hallowed territory that sealed his reputation as an American master: the world of Frank Bascombe, and the landscape of his celebrated novels The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land.
In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe-protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate-we've witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century.
Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.*
Editorial Reviews
08/18/2014
Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, continues to reflect on the meaning of existence in these four absorbing, funny, and often profound novellas. The collection is set in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2012. Frank considers the evanescence of life as he travels to the site of his former home on the shore; has an unsettling experience with a black woman whose family once lived in his present home in fictional Haddam; visits his prickly ex-wife, who is suffering from Parkinson’s, in an extended-care institution; and meets a dying former friend. At 68, Frank feels “old”; his bout with prostate cancer has convinced him that he’s in the “Default Period of life.” Intimations of mortality (“the bad closing in”) permeate his musings, recounted in an unadorned, profane, vernacular that conveys his witty, cynical voice. Frank’s cranky comments and free-flowing meditations about current social and political events are slyly juxtaposed with references to Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Trollope, Emerson, Milton, and others. Despite Frank’s dyspeptic outlook, Ford packs in a surprising amount of affirmation and redemption. Readers who met Frank in Ford’s earlier novels will quickly reconnect with his indelible personality. (Nov.)
The four stories in Let Me Be Frank With You find Frank in autumnal but wry spirits… His observations remain gently cutting.
Regardless of its somewhat funereal context, Let Me Be Frank With You contains many moments of levity...This comic mockery tempers but does not overwhelm the book’s essential seriousness...Frank must put his gently dogged optimism up against the fact of life’s persistent sorrow, indignity, and misfortune.
It’s altogether a joy to read, with Ford leavening the melancholy of loss (from age, and from the devastation of nature) with an ever-present humor.
For those of you who may have missed Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford’s frequent protagonist, snag Let Me Be Frank With You, one of the surprises of the season by the MSU graduate and Pulitzer Prize winner who can be both funny and profound in the same sentence.
This beautifully written book explores human connections, at times politics, race and religion, and persists in trying to fathom our infinitely puzzling and fragmented selves. It’s splendid.
In the conversational and highly digressive voice that’s become so familiar to readers over the years, Frank-aged 68, now comfortably retired and living in upscale Haddam, New Jersey-takes each day as it comes, and still finds plenty to remark upon.
Few characters in American literature have proven as durable or as interesting as Richard Ford’s long-running hero, Frank Bascombe... [Frank’s] insights are as trenchant as ever, but he seems funnier, looser, kinder somehow.
Bascombe again is portrayed as a thoughtful, ruminative man, now retired from the real-estate business. In the four novellas... the character not only confronts, but embraces his mortality in ‘anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller coaster.’
Told as a collection of longer short stories, Bascombe is grumpy, existential and searching for comfort amid a host of physical and mental maladies… if you’re an established fan of the Bascombe tales, it’ll surely be something to add to the Christmas vacation reading list.
In four linked stories, Ford’s aging Everyman surveys life after Hurricane Sandy batters New -Jersey.
Remarkably, Ford is a serious novelist whose work has been compared to the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and yet he is also capable of prose that is laugh-out-loud funny.
Like John Updike’s Rabbit series, Richard Ford’s four Frank Bascombe books have been one of the finest journeys in American letters, traveling through three decades’ worth of American life since the drifting highways of his 1986 novel The Sportswriter.
[This book] delivers what it promises: a quartet of fresh, though brief, glimpses of a beloved character... no outsized revelations, only small, smart realizations of the pain, absurdity and tenderness of contemporary life in the U.S., after the tide has come crashing in.
Ford’s style has often been referred to by critics as ‘dirty realism,’ … but the truth, at least in this new book, is that Frank’s world isn’t gritty, and the nonjudgmental awareness of his voice gives even his smallest encounters a surrealistic pseudo-omniscience.
Fans of the profoundly introspective Bascombe and the dirty realism of his middle-class existence have been rewarded by this unforeseen encore to the trilogy that began with 1986’s The Sportswriter.
Richard Ford never writes an unconsidered word…In fact, what makes Ford’s new book particularly remarkable must be how little happens in it—and how little we miss the usual Sturm und Drang of plot or fast-paced action… we are happy just to listen to him ruminate.
The heart of the genius of Frank Bascombe [is that] Ford could have suffocated him with the strictures of a quotidian existence… Instead the ordinary is an aperture into the extraordinary.
Ford steers clear of autobiography in his fiction, but his ability to tease out the psychological nuances of his heroes has made him a legend.
After a trilogy of Frank Bascombe novels spanning nearly 30 years, this latest book is four linked narratives. Now 68, Bascombe assesses his losses, including the Jersey Shore damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy.
I’ve known Frank since the publication of The Sportswriter in 1986, when word went out that Mississippi had produced yet another brilliant novelist. His writing and pithy insights keep pages turning...The funny, and sometimes sad, truth of his stories verifies our own reality.
In this impoverished context, we should be deeply grateful for Richard Ford…Moments like these give us Ford at his very best: a masterful observer of the quiet, quotidian world...
…you don’t read the Bascombe books for plot. You read them for Ford’s gleaming sentences, which in Let Me Be Frank are as burnished as ever, and for the quality of Frank’s questing intelligence, which persists in sensing what’s coming.
Say it ain’t so, Frank. I never want him to leave the theater, at least not before I do. In the meantime, the stories in Let Me Be Frank with You have led me back into rereading the earlier Bascombe books - an advantage of art over life.
Through Ford’s writing, Frank Bascombe became a major literary figure during the final years of the 20th century, serving as a witness to the era’s aspirations and defeats… Frank Bascombe remains a literary character who is capable of striking chords in readers that they will clearly recognize in themselves.
Though often compared to Updike’s Rabbit, Frank is far more discerning and sophisticated. He analyzes the landscape, while Rabbit melts into it. He comprehends what only mystifies Rabbit.
A quartet of stories set around Christmas 2012 (each Bascombe volume co-opts a holiday), amid the physical and emotional debris of Hurricane Sandy, it’s an estimable book-wise, funny and superbly attentive to the world. If this is the last of Bascombe, it’s an honorable end.
Now Frank has returned, ushering us through the four linked novellas in Let Me Be Frank With You - which arrives, like an early Christmas gift, to soothe fans who assumed they’d never again have the pleasure of wading through his stream of consciousness.
[Subtle] stories told with wit and grace… Ford has established himself as one of contemporary America’s most interesting storytellers. Let Me be Frank with You does nothing to diminish this well-deserved reputation.
Despite the sober subject matter, Frank is as bitingly funny as ever. His choice observations and the stories he tells reveal a man whose limitations and failings coexist with soaring attempts to make sense of a world undone by fate.
Frank is pushing 70 but he remains a fascinating emblem of his times… I admire Ford for bringing back Frank Bascombe as an old man and for creating a form and compressing a style to represent one late sexagenarian’s circumstances and consciousness without succumbing to geezer sentimentality or contrived serenity.
Let Me Be Frank with You marks the fourth book that Frank [Bascombe] has taken center-stage, and the four stories offered between its covers find the character now deep into his waning years—the age that Frank refers to as his ‘Default Period of life.’
In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment.
The beauty of this book lies in its encompassing humanity, its juxtaposition of gravity and wit, and the flawed duality of our protagonist… Ford illuminates parts of us all.
Though his wit tends toward the acerbic, there’s an undercurrent of gratitude for everything that’s come to him… Anyone who’s followed that life since it first appeared on the page can only feel a similar gratitude to Ford for having created it.
Funny, touching and profound… Threading its way through all four tales is Frank’s (Ford’s) sometimes chilling, always wry take on mortality… The ability of slight things to forestall reflection on the weightiest of issues is Ford’s rich theme here, and no one mines it more eloquently.
The stories…serve as vehicles for Frank’s witty, sad, poignant and incisive ruminations on life in America in the early 21st century... Readers of the Bascombe trilogy… are sure to be delighted at this unexpected opportunity to renew their acquaintance with Frank and see how he’s coping with life’s changes.
Of all the serial heroes bustling through postwar American fiction, Frank Bascombe makes the strongest claim on our affection… It is Mr. Ford’s achievement to have made the musings of this suburban everyman captivating.
The fact that Let Me works as well as it does is a testament to Mr. Ford’s strengths as a writer and his ability to turn his hero’s contradictions and discontinuities into something more like the genuine complexities of a real human being.
Incredibly, Ford maintains, over 30 years, Frank’s voice-he sounds much as he did when he was 38, except he is a little more prone to pontificating… This is what gripped readers on the first page of The Sportswriter…and what continues in Let Me Be Frank With You.
Frank has reached his twilight years with his trademark wit and ruminative self-awareness intact, even if his body is starting to slide into geriatric betrayal...There’s no doubt that this is the same old Frank..”Grade: B+
Frank Bascombe, who made his first appearance in The Sportswriter in 1986, returns in his fourth novel, and there are abundant reasons to be grateful.
The Pulizer Prize-winner ricochets off his ‘Frank Bascombe Trilogy’ of novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land) with four themed stories told by Bascombe, his insightful, funny and irreverent main character now living in New Jersey.
In his Frank Bascombe novels—The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land—Richard Ford bares the male psyche at various ages. Bascombe is retired now, and let’s just say: Life’s leading to one inevitable place. As ever, his ruminations offer insight.
Bascombe is a little grumpier than before but no less introspective...As in the previous books, his fast-running internal commentary on those neighbors...is the book’s engine, streaming along, carrying us from one scene to the next and binding them all together.
… caustically hilarious, warmly philosophical, and emotionally lush… In each neatly linked tale, Frank ruminates misanthropically, wittily, and wisely about love, family, friendship, race, politics, and the mystery of the self…Like Frank, Ford, certainly is incisively frank, forensically observant, and covertly tender.
The American master returns with another dispatch from Frank Bascombe.
Ford is celebrated for his Frank Bascombe novels—stories swirling around the life of a middle-aged real estate agent. His profession lends itself to Ford’s rich descriptions of natural land. Here, Ford places Bascombe in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
A visit with Richard Ford’s fictional doppelganger, Frank Bascombe, continues to provide insight into the ever-changing American middle class, their hopes, dreams, and frustrations. Narrator Richard Poe is a gifted interpreter of Ford’s vision, with his sonorous tone and casual but engaging pacing. This latest check-in with Frank depicts the ordinary frustrations of life that everyone has to deal with, mixed with the disheartening and inevitable problems of growing older. Poe’s subtle narration is filled with nuance, along with a nod to both the character’s and the author’s maturation. The conclusion, the summing up of all that has happened to Frank, boils down to a universal truth that all of us find out if we live long enough. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940173722362 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 11/04/2014 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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