Here is an unforgettable Valentine’s card of a novel, particularly affecting for those of us from the boomer years or earlier. I suppose there are spoilers in what follows, but they wouldn’t deter me from reading this novel if I came across this personal analysis. At least that is my hope in writing this.
Richard Ford does not tilt the windmill into fantasy, but into the realities of aging and dying, the father/son relationship, and the carnival of American culture in, yet, another novel whose main character is his alter ego, Frank Bascombe. I originally thought his novel, Canada, marked the passing of Frank Bascombe. But Frank was not yet down and out. He came back with Let Me Be Frank With You so I thought the latter, four novellas, loosely held together by Hurricane Sandy and the theme of aging, might be the last we hear from Frank. That was followed by his intimate memoir about his parents, Between Them;Remembering My Parents. Surely that meant Ford was moving on to new pastures.
But, no, Frank had more to say through Ford, although Frank is now older, burdened by his own health issues. More significantly, there is now the major health issue of his sole surviving son, Paul, who at 47 is suffering from ALS, and Frank has chosen to be his caretaker. This is the same Frank as I described in Let Me Be Frank With You: “it is Frank’s voice, the way he thinks, that connects with me -- plaintive, sardonic, ironic, perplexed, now somewhat resigned, and with a wry wit.”
I say “tilting the windmill” into life purposely, as the novel has elements of Don Quixote. The literary critic Harold Bloom says “Don Quixote is the first modern novel, and that the protagonist is at war with Freud's reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying…. [A] recurring theme is the human need to withstand suffering.”
And there is abundant suffering in Be Mine. Dostoevsky said once "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." Frank and his son prove to be worthy. Ford even indulges in a piece of metafiction to make his point; Dying makes the non-dying feel excluded and shabby, since dying’s struggle is like no other. Long ago, when I was a doomed-to-fail scribbler of mid-century American short stories of the sort that showed up in The New Yorker, written by John Cheever and John Updike (mine never did even once), I practiced the “rule” taught me in my writing course at Michigan, which stipulated that inserting a death into a fragile short story was never permitted, since death must have importance proportional to the life that’s ended, and short stories, my teacher believed, weren’t good at relating the vastness of human life. (Ford, in my mind, belongs in the company of Cheever and Updike as being astute observers of American life.)
Imagine caring for a 47 year old son who has ALS. Frank’s solution, with the help of Dr. Catherine Flaherty, who we meet at the beginning of the book and whose presence later provides a satisfying denouement, is to get his son into an experimental program at Mayo in Rochester MN. She had recently stepped down as head of endocrinology at Scripps La Jolla. Catherine. Light of my life, fire of my loins. Here was a long story, as there is for everything if you survive. Since 1983, Catherine (who’s 60) and I have never totally been out of touch. And since Sally’s departure, she and I have spoken a time or two with a circling, half-suppressed fragrance of possibility scent-able down the cyberlines. But Catherine had other suitors she never took seriously, a “big doctor” career, and a divorce. And yet she has never left Frank’s psyche.
And so begins the journey, but most of the distance is covered between the 600 mile trek between Mayo and Mount Rushmore, culminating on Valentine’s Day. Here is a canvas for Ford to paint his themes.
I must digress to what I wrote about his deeply affecting memoir Between Them; Remembering My Parents. I quoted something which I think profoundly influences this novel: But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father. Much of these things I've written here. Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their fathers' orbit and sight. My father did not experience this. And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it. The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that ‘... my loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult.’ Mine is the same - and also different - inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become. And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss - we must all make the most of the lives we find - there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue - qualities that merit notice in us all. For his son, not to have left this record would be a sad loss indeed.
Be Mine fills in those emotional blanks. The voice of Frank is clear; you could say being on a quixotic journey. Paul could be a stand in for the author himself; “making the life” he is found. I just had an aching feeling that in Be Mine Ford is working out the emotional pain of the absent father. And, as so much of the novel is about aging and dying, what does one value in the decreasing moments left in a long life?
Yet how we chose to deal with our suffering is book-ended by two chapters with the same title: “Happiness.” Thus, purely on average, I would say I’ve been happy. Happy enough, at least, to be Frank Bascombe and not someone else. Ford’s acerbic sense of humor comes through: It’s widely acknowledged that people live longer and stay happier the more stuff they can forget or ignore. That was at the start of the emotional and literal journey with his son.
And “happiness” at end is another piece of metafiction: I’d once read in a book about writing that in good novels, anything can follow anything, and nothing ever necessarily follows anything else. To me this was an invaluable revelation and relief, as it is precisely like life—ants scrabbling on a cupcake. I didn’t see I had to speculate about what caused what. And truthfully, I believe it to this day. Witness my son’s relentless assault by ALS, which as far as the best medical science understands, poses a near complete mystery. Yes, we see it happening. But nothing specifically causes it or specifically doesn’t cause it. It just happens. Happiness = Acceptance. We are dealt the cards; how we play them is more important that what we are dealt.
The journey itself and his observations about the America we are left with is reminiscent of another novel I read which is even more transparently modeled after Don Quixote, Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte
A key issue in my reading of that book was the following: “There are pastiches of popular culture the sum of which point the way to the vapid disintegration of values and truth, making it a hallmark work of dystopian literature…. As a picaresque novel it savagely satires the entire America of now, a society gone wild with the self indulgent consumption of popular culture, conspiracy theories, xenophobia, opioid addition, and political polarization.”
Ford’s observations go further into the funhouse of today’s eerie reality; a cartoonish view of what this nation has become, but in black humor lays the truth.
While Paul is at the Mayo clinic, Frank has sought out the services of Betty Tran, a Vietnamese masseuse in one of those shopping centers. He thinks he’s in love with her. Diminutive, smiling, cheerful, with bobbed hair and darkly alert eyes. 4 feet, 10 inches, not a centimeter taller, with pert, friendly gestures that were welcoming yet confident, happy to look me in the eye and give me a slightly unsettling wink. …But sitting, talking two hours with pretty, exciting, vivid, immensely likeable Betty was like a fantasy (I’m told) men my age frequently indulge: the high school girl you should’ve loved but for a thousand reasons didn’t, yet dream you could still love.
Apparently she gave “happy endings.” As Frank arrives to give her a “Be Mine on Valentine’s Day” card she is being hauled off by the police, smiling, waving a dainty hand, her slender arm bare, bobbling her head of bright yellow hair in a gesture she’s performed for me other times. “Good-bye, good-bye. Come back, come back,” words I “hear” as if they were booming through a PA. “Good-bye, good-bye. Come back, come back.”
Paul wants to rent an RV and travel all over the southwest which given his condition would be challenging for them both. Frank comes up with the idea of a shorter road trip to Mount Rushmore but rent the RV at the place he wants—A Fool’s Paradise—a roadside emporium we’ve visited once and where one finds for-sale-or-rent golf carts, septic tanks, porta-potties, snowmobiles, cherry pickers, enormous American flags, blank grave monuments, waterslide parts and an array of 25 used RVs set out in rows in the frozen snow. Paul can choose whichever RV rig he wants. And the minute his Medical Pioneer event’s over, we can load up and set off for Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, making stops at whatever loony sights we find. The only one available is an old Dodge Windbreaker Camper, not really suitable to be lived in during the cold nights, obligating them to stay in hotels along the way.
I had to laugh as their first stop is at a Hilton Garden Inn, where we usually stay when traveling along the spider web of the Interstates and, as Frank, specifying a double not by the elevator, the ice machine or the pool, two free bottles of…Dasani water.
Then on to the “World’s Only Corn Palace” in Mitchell, SD, where my parents stopped off in our sole transcontinental junket in 1954… which is billed as “Everything in your wildest dreams made out of corn.” This has elements up Paul’s alley—self-conscious inanity, latent juvenile sexual content and a “life in these United States” down-home garishness. Again, he is hard to predict—which can be good.
Frank has hit pay dirt with his son. Like me, there’s nothing my son thrills to more than the anomalies of commerce….The “Place Corn Boutique” spreads over the entire arena/performance venue/polling place; a Macy’s of corn-themed crapola….All of it precisely what Paul Bascombe is put on the earth to seek, be deeply interested in and mesmerized by. I could not have been more prescient.
The banter between Frank and his son is a balance between contentious and affection. The dialogue is poignant.
From there they go to the Fawning Buffalo Casino, Golf and Deluxe Convention Hotel. Something for everyone! Ford’s description constitutes hilarious realism: There’s a “Rolling Stones All-Native” cover band in the Circle-the-Wagons supper club. Exotic Entertainment in the Counting Coup Lounge. Ugly sweater, wet T-shirt and best-butt contests every weekend. A “gigantic” indoor waterslide. A “world famous” Tahitian Buffet. Plus, “Lifestyle Enrichment” classes, a writers workshop, a mortuary science job fair, Tai Chi instruction, and a “How to Live in the Present” seminar taught by Native psychologists with degrees from South Dakota State. Plus, “Loose Slots” and Valentine’s room rates for lovers—which my son and I are not but might pass for. There’s also a free shuttle to the “The Monuments” every two hours, which appeals to me, since I’m not sure the Windbreaker makes the climb if the weather turns against us, which it could.
But the Fawning Buffalo is not an inspired choice. Paul is irate, wheelchair bound, feeling remote from the possibilities the carnival-like atmosphere offers, Frank pressing to get a room, thinking of the buffet and secretly maybe a lapdance when his son goes to bed. They argue in front of the room clerk “But we can still get the Valentine’s suite. I’ll order you up exotic room service. I’m sure it’s available.” I mean this. “You’re an asshole.” “Why am I an asshole? Life’s a journey, son. You’re on it.” I’m willing to piss him off if I can’t make him happy. Though I wish I could. He is quite a conventional, unadventurous man when you come down to it. Like me. “It’s not a journey to here,” he says savagely…. Fatherhood is a battle in any language.
They leave, but as Valentine’s Day is such a big holiday there, they try every hotel/motel after leaving. They’re all full. If I’d prevailed at the Fawning Buffalo, I’d right now be in the Tahitian Buffet, a couple of free Stolis to the good. Never let your son decide things.
At another Hilton, the clerk knows an out of the way motel where they could stay. They have to double back to get there. It is a broken down mostly abandoned place, with aging down to earth proprietors, relics of the past. In a dank room Frank sleeps in his clothes next to his son. And Frank thinks.
I have said little on the subject; but I am moved by whatever it is my son is at this drastic intersection of life. There should be a word for that—I wish I knew it—for what he is, a word that can be inserted in all obituaries to help them speak truth about human existence. Though whatever that word is, “courage” isn’t it.
Finally, the big day, Mount Rushmore, another circus to end their journey, but this time, despite the artificiality of it all, those faces on the mountain, the oohing and aahing, the selfies, etc., Frank and Paul, reconcile a lifetime.
“This is great. I love this,” Paul Bascombe—the Paul Bascombe—says. He is craned forward in his chair, fingering his silver ear stud, eyes riveted with all the others of us, upon the four chiseled visages. I cannot completely believe I’ve brought this unlikeliest of moments about, and can be here standing where I’m standing—with my son. How often do anyone’s best-laid plans work out?....I am happy to have done one seemingly right thing for one seemingly not wrong reason. Any trip can be perilous once you commit to the destination, as we have….“Do you know why it’s so great…Why I’ll never be able to thank you enough?” “Tell me.” “It’s completely pointless and ridiculous, and it’s great.” I’m merely happy to believe we see the same thing the same way for once—more or less. It is pointless and it is stupid. “We’re bonded,” Paul says slyly, “It’s not really like any place else, is it? It’s monumental without being majestic.” There is no trace of disappointment, double or triple meaning.
The last chapter, again, “Happiness,” is perhaps the best piece of writing I’ve read in a long time, languid and elegant (Cheeveresque), philosophical but, even what Frank has endured and at his age, hopeful. Paul would approve. Now that I’ve read the work, taking notes, I can now go back and reread it simply for pleasure and Ford’s exquisite writing. Maybe before Valentine’s Day?
