Be Mine

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Yes, you can,” I say. “Shift your weight. I’ll push you.” I am pushing him—his pillowy butt, his still-muscled thighs straining, straining … There is still something to be said about the author’s snarky humor and wit. His view of the world.

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Goodreads

Now in his 70's, Frank is once again on a roadtrip with his son Paul with whom he first meandered in the Pulitzer winning Independence Day, but now Paul is 47, and Frank is his caretaker since he has ALS (or Al's, as they call it). So dealing with his own aging body as well as the ever increasing needs of a person with that fatal uncompromising condition, Frank thinks it a great idea if they go to Mount Rushmore on Valentine's Day in a rented camper. In this memorable novel, Richard Ford puts on displays the prose, wit, and intelligence that make him one of our most acclaimedliving writers. Be Mine is a profound, funny, poignant love letter to our beleaguered world.Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.

Richard Ford BBC Radio 4 - Open Book, Richard Ford

I haven’t read the first four in the series, so I was at a disadvantage to understand Frank’s previous world. Especially, learning that the author's book in the series: Independence Day won The Pulitzer. As well as Frank and his son, Be Mine also features the return of minor characters beloved of Ford’s readers, such as Mike Mahoney, a Tibetan-American who changed his name to “something more Irish”.

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A trip is planned– rent a dilapidated RV and make the trek up to the glorious Mount Rushmore with the goal of helping the guys bond while shaking off a painfully claustrophobic walk of death. Father and son look to break down some of the walls neglect has fostered over the years. The question looms…why this destination? What huge significance can a commercial tourist trap like Mount Rushmore be in the comprehension of a life? In the drawing room, we sit side by side, and prepare to talk about Frank Bascombe, Ford’s most famous creation and the man who’ll inevitably outlive him. Bascombe first appeared in his 1986 novel The Sportswriter – an American everyman who suffers an existential crisis after the death of his young son (a failed novelist turned sports journalist, Bascombe later moves into property). Three more books about him followed – Independence Day (1995), the second, won the Pulitzer prize for fiction – and now here is the fifth and, we are forewarned, final book in the series, Be Mine.