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?