Life’s not really a journey, but it resembles one, and thus many stories of people’s lives recount journeys too. There’s Odysseus making his slow voyage back to Ithaca, Don Quixote armouring up and becoming a knight errant, Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale and Huck Finn and Jim lighting down the Mississippi. The modern embodiment of this genre is the road-trip novel, and nowhere more so than in the US, the natural home of the automobile, where Eisenhower’s interstate highways unite and divide the nation’s inhabitants. Richard Ford’s new novel fits somewhere between the lyricism of On the Road and the bleakness of The Road, continuing the story of his perennial protagonist and first-person narrator Frank Bascombe, a kind of hyper-literate everyman.
Now old but not that old, Frank devises a road trip with his terminally ill son from Rochester, Minnesota, to Mt Rushmore. There’s a reflexive irony at work here, in the novel and the trip itself: Bascombe’s son, Paul, has long dreamed of visiting as many conceptually weird or oddly named places – Whynot, Mississippi; Stinking Springs, New Mexico; Cape Flattery, Washington; Sopchoppy, Florida – as possible. What’s possible, of course, has diminished in the face of his rapidly advancing illness, so Mt Rushmore it is.
Paul delights in the absurd – in the literal corniness, for instance, of the Corn Palace (a real place that, with its onion-topped turrets, looks strangely like the Kremlin) in South Dakota. Frank delights in whatever brings his dying son pleasure. It could all be very sentimental, except neither man is a particularly good or even particularly nice human being. They bicker constantly and Paul needles his father into revelations Frank would probably rather keep to himself.
A nuanced portrait of a father-son relationship, then, but it’s more than that. The trip provides opportunities for descriptions of people and places, descriptions that cumulatively offer a vision of America as it is now, or as it was during the Trump presidency. Trump flags on lawns, Trump and Biden bumper stickers are superficial markers of something deeper and more pervasive: the overwriting of landscape by political and economic forces. The backdrop is a never-ending built environment, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester to the strip-malls, franchises and motels that line the streets to the presidents’ faces carved into the rock.
The details we see are, of course, filtered through Frank’s eyes, and perhaps through the eyes of Richard Ford. At times, you sense an ironic distance between Frank’s perception and that of the wiser author, and at other times, that distance disappears. Early in the novel, the elder Bascombe eyes “two bona fide, blondie Minnesota babes – a buxom Gudrun and a pouty Astrid”. Ford wouldn’t describe these women in these terms – at least I don’t think he would. But that tendency to clump individuals together extends beyond the male gaze and takes in, for example, “oldie couples, a contingent of spindly Asians wearing germ masks, plenty of beefy farm-boy types with undersized girlfriends”.
It’s both clever and crude, quickfire and sweeping, judgment masquerading as observation. It’s the kind of thing Paul Theroux has made into a style. Yet the sidelong reference to Covid introduces a plot detail that, when pursued towards the end of the novel, is so subtly delivered that one almost misses it.
In the early chapters, Frank attempts to drive his son downtown to see a movie – which, in a Minnesota winter, is a difficult and even dangerous business. He has reserved tickets, but they are thwarted by a protest outside the theatre and an officious mall cop, and have to turn back. It’s the novel in miniature, where plans go awry and disappointments accrue.
Frank and Paul do reach their destination, but Mt Rushmore is, well, Mt Rushmore, and the novel’s climax is deliberately somewhat anticlimactic. Every road trip, every life, must end. Frank Bascombe’s own death cannot be far in the future, and the novel is partly the story of his own gathering together of threads, reviving old, not quite extinct relationships, reconciling himself with what is rather than what might have been.
Ford does that difficult thing: recording what is essentially a failure (very little, apart from the Corn Palace, lives up to expectations), a failure from which is retrieved some measure of success. This isn’t a suspenseful novel: the outcome is ordained from the start. As with any journey, it’s the getting there that’s memorable.
Be Mine, by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
