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annegreen 's review for:
Itsenäisyyspäivä
by Richard Ford
A great book, (it won the Pulitzer so it was judged so by experts presumably) but often a fraught reading experience. At times I was swept away by admiration for the author's skill and other times when I felt like throwing it across the room.
The book is the sequel to “The Sportswriter”, part two of a quartet about Frank Bascombe, a middle-aged man living in 1980s America. It's an odyssey in that it follows (in excruciating detail) the course of Frank Bascombe's life over the course of the Independence Day weekend, an odyssey that's just as much emotional as geographical. By the end of this long book, Frank has negotiated the physical journey – he’s back home again – but it’s not entirely clear that he’s negotiated the other one. He’s made progress, but sufficient questions remain (in his head and the reader’s) to provide ample fodder for the sequel, which I’ve yet to read.
Frank is undergoing a midlife crisis precipitated by a combination of angst-rife situations, including divorce, his ex-wife's remarriage to a man more successful than he, the death of a son, a troubled relationship with the disturbed surviving son, a shaky relationship fraught by the contradictory drive to commit and the desire to stay safely insulated from the complications a commitment would entail, plus a recent career change. As a result he's adopted a survival strategy which he calls “The Existence Period” which allows him to “ignore much of what I don’t like or that seems worrisome and embroiling and then usually see it go away.” In this way he's taught himself to see “unfixable crises cruise past him like damaged boats and realise that fixing one in six is a damn good average and the rest you have to let go.”
The purpose of the novel, which is almost devoid of plot, seems to be to show that Frank, in confronting certain exigencies, learns that there are certain things that can’t be ignored or let go, and however unfixable, must be somehow confronted and dealt with.
It's a brilliant feat of characterisation but it can begin to feel claustrophobic being inside the head of Frank Bascombe for 450 odd pages, perhaps because the prose is so flooded with detail and his introspection is so solipsistic in nature (but then isn’t everyones?). It sometimes feels as if the writer has peeled back the skin over Frank’s brain and exposed the intricate writhings and machinations within, the whole of it devoid of any relief in the form of imminent resolution.
Despite this, it's brilliant, insightful, moving and very funny. If you’ve got sufficient stamina to go the distance with Frank, you'll be left with the feeling that closing the last page doesn’t mean you’re finished with him yet.
The book is the sequel to “The Sportswriter”, part two of a quartet about Frank Bascombe, a middle-aged man living in 1980s America. It's an odyssey in that it follows (in excruciating detail) the course of Frank Bascombe's life over the course of the Independence Day weekend, an odyssey that's just as much emotional as geographical. By the end of this long book, Frank has negotiated the physical journey – he’s back home again – but it’s not entirely clear that he’s negotiated the other one. He’s made progress, but sufficient questions remain (in his head and the reader’s) to provide ample fodder for the sequel, which I’ve yet to read.
Frank is undergoing a midlife crisis precipitated by a combination of angst-rife situations, including divorce, his ex-wife's remarriage to a man more successful than he, the death of a son, a troubled relationship with the disturbed surviving son, a shaky relationship fraught by the contradictory drive to commit and the desire to stay safely insulated from the complications a commitment would entail, plus a recent career change. As a result he's adopted a survival strategy which he calls “The Existence Period” which allows him to “ignore much of what I don’t like or that seems worrisome and embroiling and then usually see it go away.” In this way he's taught himself to see “unfixable crises cruise past him like damaged boats and realise that fixing one in six is a damn good average and the rest you have to let go.”
The purpose of the novel, which is almost devoid of plot, seems to be to show that Frank, in confronting certain exigencies, learns that there are certain things that can’t be ignored or let go, and however unfixable, must be somehow confronted and dealt with.
It's a brilliant feat of characterisation but it can begin to feel claustrophobic being inside the head of Frank Bascombe for 450 odd pages, perhaps because the prose is so flooded with detail and his introspection is so solipsistic in nature (but then isn’t everyones?). It sometimes feels as if the writer has peeled back the skin over Frank’s brain and exposed the intricate writhings and machinations within, the whole of it devoid of any relief in the form of imminent resolution.
Despite this, it's brilliant, insightful, moving and very funny. If you’ve got sufficient stamina to go the distance with Frank, you'll be left with the feeling that closing the last page doesn’t mean you’re finished with him yet.