Fellow Boomer Frank Bascombe Returns in Richard Ford’s New Book

If you’re a Boomer, then Frank Bascombe is one of us, and it’s nice to have him back and once more pondering the past, fretting about the future and coping with an unsettled present. His creator, Richard Ford, has somewhat begrudgingly returned Frank to us in Let Me Be Frank With You, continuing a life started nearly 30 years ago in The Sportswriter (1986), picked up again in the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day (1995) and seemingly wound down in The Lay of the Land (2006). But there always seemed something a little too easy about the outcome of the last novel, something left dangling in a tangled life marked by sorrow, loss, moments of joy, hopes, longings, failure and success.

And so now Ford returns to his everyman in response, he admits, to requests from readers, but also a desire to touch on “the consequences of a hurricane that the media wouldn’t pay attention to.” In other words, the human debris left behind to be dealt with long after the storm — in this case, Hurricane Sandy and its disorienting aftermath that causes Frank to realize nothing is here to stay.

He’s now 68, still living in New Jersey, contentedly married, retired from selling real estate, and aware of and troubled by both the liberations and challenges of creeping age. In four interconnected novellas, Frank deals with his “new normal,” awakens to the need to savor the little moments, even accepts that less is more as he jettisons even friends. He’s not always lovable, sometimes not even likable in his comments and actions, but that’s what makes him believable on the page.

In Quotes, Truth Often Lurks

Quotations: We find them at odd times in odd places, and are struck by a truth or insight. Or we seek them out to help us express ourselves better by using someone else’s words when failed by our own. They can be found in handy collections for easy access, or happened upon and saved—torn from a page or jotted in a notebook, or even copied and pasted in electronic form. Sometimes we commit them to memory, waiting for the right moment to utilize them.

Somehow they help us make sense of things, or offer a better way to explain something, or add something concrete to something felt, or imagined. “Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean,” wrote Theodore Dreiser. “Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.”

See what I just did? Enlisted a quote from a respected writer to help make my case, pulled from an ever-expanding collection that resides in a laptop file labeled simply, “Quotes.”

Neil Young’s Candid Memoir Reveals the Heart & Soul of a Renaissance Man

I can’t recall with certainty when or how I heard Neil Young for the first time. It was probably through Buffalo Springfield, a short-lived yet influential group that still stands up well. I definitely recall Neil’s first solo effort in 1969, but it was the next two–“Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” and “After the Gold Rush”—that firmly implanted his voice and guitar into my soul. I distinctly remember Neil’s singular company while driving fast and hard through rural North Carolina late one night to visit a girl whose well-heeled parents had little interest in a long-haired kid in ragged jeans stopping by: “I was lying in a burned out basement with the full moon in my eyes…”

New Story in Real South Magazine

Real South Magazine published “Kicking Dante’s Ass” in the January/February 2013 issue. Click here to read the entire story: “Kicking Dante’s Ass”