A review by stevienlcf
Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford

4.0

I have missed Frank Bascombe. In Ford's four novellas, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that devastated the New Jersey shore, we reunite with Frank at age 68, “enjoying the Next Level of life – conceivably the last: a member of the clean-desk demographic, freed to do unalloyed good in the world, should I choose to.” But Frank isn’t really enjoying his retirement from selling residential real estate in the now-popped realty bubble. Although he reads to the blind and welcomes home soldiers at the airport, he is riddled with fears that beset the aging. He is concerned that he “reek[s] like a monkey’s closet” and that he has embraced the “gramps shuffle.” He worries more about falling on ice than whether there is an afterlife since he could no longer hop up after a spill: “Now it’s a death sentence.” He refuses to look into mirrors anymore since it’s “cheaper than surgery.” He spends his days fulfilling obligations – to Arnie, who owns a carriage-trade seafood boutique and who had purchased Frank’s beach house which was destroyed in the hurricane; to the daughter of the former owner of his current home who wished to revisit her childhood home, the site of family tragedy of epic proportions; his first wife, Ann, a resident of a swank but sterile staged-care facility who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and whom Frank feels some responsibility for despite the fact that they had “not been all that friendly” since their divorce thirty years prior; and an old friend in the end-stages of pancreatic cancer. Richard Ford hasn’t written a feel-good story, but I was glad to have this opportunity to reunite with the cerebral Frank Bascombe.