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Frank Bascombe #1–3
The Bascombe Novels
A trilogy of brilliant novels— The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land —that charts the life and times of Frank Bascombe, one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction.
When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed—by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, through Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, witnessing his fortune’s rise and his family’s fragmentation. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the most subtle nuances of the human condition—all its pathos and beauty and strangeness—Ford transforms this ordinary man’s life into a riveting, moving parable of life in America today.
When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed—by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, through Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, witnessing his fortune’s rise and his family’s fragmentation. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the most subtle nuances of the human condition—all its pathos and beauty and strangeness—Ford transforms this ordinary man’s life into a riveting, moving parable of life in America today.
1352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
About the author
Richard Ford
251 books1,680 followersRichard Ford, born February 16, 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories. Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.
His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996, also winning the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.
His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996, also winning the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 29, 2016
I undertook the Bascombe novels after a friend suggested reading Richard Ford to bridge the literary abyss left by the death of John Updike. I was encouraged to believe that Frank Bascombe was a worthy successor to Rabbit Angstrom. I started with the novella Let Me Be Frank, and not entirely liking it or understanding the appeal many attribute to his character Frank Bascombe, bought the above volume and read The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land (1322 pages in toto) in the course of a grueling week.
I can understand why many might turn to Ford for a literary voice worth reading. After all, we can't all exist on the thin gushing gruel that passes for literature 15 years into the Twenty-First Century.
And Frank Bascombe, writer-turned-sportswriter-turned-real estate salesman-turned-retiree, has a unique male voice. He thinks, he reconsiders, he lusts, he lusts some more, he acquires and sheds wives and homes, he tries to do good peddling, acquiring and leasing real estate, he at times tries to be a good family man, he worries about his prostate cancer and its consequences for his manliness and the dampness of his trousers, and he spends a lot of time doing bashing the Bushes and Republicans. The musings are consistently interesting, intelligent, funny. The events around which the three novels are constructed -- an Easter weekend in the 80's, a Fourth of July later in that decade, Thanksgiving in the time of the New Millennium -- are entertaining (if a little tedious). Like Updike, Ford captures bits of the American scene contemporary with the novels, albeit in that curious state called of unreality named New Jersey.
I'm not going to try to recount any of the complex interconnected events of these novels and the following novella. Reading the them in quick succession was like riding on an endlessly intricate highway. Fiction of course allows authors license to indulge implausibility for the sake of artistic effect. In a world where a substantial public exists to read silly fantasies about warriors and vampires and witches and princesses and shape-shifters, and all the other whippy-creamy stuff that crams chain "bookstores" (somewhere next to toys, greeting cards, DVDs and lattes grandes), who can possibly fault a highly literate author for cramming a few days with a totally unnatural concatenation of unlikely events? Each of the novels makes for a pretty good read and together I must say they make for a very good read (really 3. 5 stars). Bascombe's prose is highly literate, and highly readable, except when occasionally it gets a little over-convoluted or goes on just too long, as the novels seemed to want to stretch to infinity and beyond. But at the same time I never could care much about old Frank or what happened to him in any of the novels, and a few months later neither remember many of the events nor care that I don't. I won't reread them.
Besides the lack of something touching my (admittedly crusty) soul, I am very much bugged by what I consider to be an inauthentic narrative voice. Now, Ford's Frank Bascombe did publish a book of stories, but he quickly gave up academia and a literary life to become a sportswriter, then began to hawk real estate in pseudo-Princeton and then pseudo Point Pleasant, in pointlessly unpleasant New Jersey, with only some incidental collegiate instructing. In Frank's idealized New jersey he with some regularity engaged in fairly stupid acts, including careless oversight of his son, drunken exhibitions, bar fights, philandering. At virtually all points he shows himself to be a true member of the not-so-great-generation: despite his best efforts he is a very flawed family man, focused on that which all of us Baby Boomers love most: the person in the mirror. But as the narrator of the bulging, on-flowing Bascombe novels, he speaks with an overly elegant voice, redolent of the most refined ivory tower, ever studded with fifty-dollar words that sent this pedantic reader scurrying to the dictionary with alarming frequency. In many of his discourses on the meaning of things, or in his dialogues with loved ones in which he sought to get to the heart of matters interpersonal, I found nothing speaking of real human thought, just fluttering thoughts the real meaning of which I could not grasp. His language seemed pointlessly discordant with his lower-brow essence. Perhaps as a result I found Frank neither plausible or even very interesting. Maybe my bad; maybe not. Maybe no Baby Boomer in the end is either interesting or lovable.
And so, as Lloyd Bentsen might say, I have read Harry Angstrom, I feel that I have known and loved Harry Angstrom, and you, Frank Bascombe, are no Harry Angstrom. Updike's prose was more poetic than Ford's, and God knows there may never have been a popular writer with more academic knowledge of every kind than John Updike. And yet good old Rabbit's voice always rang true to his middle-class character, and could frequently astonish a reader with perception that for all his flaws Rabbit shared thoughts and feelings that the reader had thought unique to himself.
So (as it now is obligatory to say at the beginning of a postmodern sentence), my "takeaway" is that individually or collectively the Bascombe novels are above-average literary fodder, but certainly not the "unbestimmte Nahrung" with which Updike routinely fed his hungry readers.
I can understand why many might turn to Ford for a literary voice worth reading. After all, we can't all exist on the thin gushing gruel that passes for literature 15 years into the Twenty-First Century.
And Frank Bascombe, writer-turned-sportswriter-turned-real estate salesman-turned-retiree, has a unique male voice. He thinks, he reconsiders, he lusts, he lusts some more, he acquires and sheds wives and homes, he tries to do good peddling, acquiring and leasing real estate, he at times tries to be a good family man, he worries about his prostate cancer and its consequences for his manliness and the dampness of his trousers, and he spends a lot of time doing bashing the Bushes and Republicans. The musings are consistently interesting, intelligent, funny. The events around which the three novels are constructed -- an Easter weekend in the 80's, a Fourth of July later in that decade, Thanksgiving in the time of the New Millennium -- are entertaining (if a little tedious). Like Updike, Ford captures bits of the American scene contemporary with the novels, albeit in that curious state called of unreality named New Jersey.
I'm not going to try to recount any of the complex interconnected events of these novels and the following novella. Reading the them in quick succession was like riding on an endlessly intricate highway. Fiction of course allows authors license to indulge implausibility for the sake of artistic effect. In a world where a substantial public exists to read silly fantasies about warriors and vampires and witches and princesses and shape-shifters, and all the other whippy-creamy stuff that crams chain "bookstores" (somewhere next to toys, greeting cards, DVDs and lattes grandes), who can possibly fault a highly literate author for cramming a few days with a totally unnatural concatenation of unlikely events? Each of the novels makes for a pretty good read and together I must say they make for a very good read (really 3. 5 stars). Bascombe's prose is highly literate, and highly readable, except when occasionally it gets a little over-convoluted or goes on just too long, as the novels seemed to want to stretch to infinity and beyond. But at the same time I never could care much about old Frank or what happened to him in any of the novels, and a few months later neither remember many of the events nor care that I don't. I won't reread them.
Besides the lack of something touching my (admittedly crusty) soul, I am very much bugged by what I consider to be an inauthentic narrative voice. Now, Ford's Frank Bascombe did publish a book of stories, but he quickly gave up academia and a literary life to become a sportswriter, then began to hawk real estate in pseudo-Princeton and then pseudo Point Pleasant, in pointlessly unpleasant New Jersey, with only some incidental collegiate instructing. In Frank's idealized New jersey he with some regularity engaged in fairly stupid acts, including careless oversight of his son, drunken exhibitions, bar fights, philandering. At virtually all points he shows himself to be a true member of the not-so-great-generation: despite his best efforts he is a very flawed family man, focused on that which all of us Baby Boomers love most: the person in the mirror. But as the narrator of the bulging, on-flowing Bascombe novels, he speaks with an overly elegant voice, redolent of the most refined ivory tower, ever studded with fifty-dollar words that sent this pedantic reader scurrying to the dictionary with alarming frequency. In many of his discourses on the meaning of things, or in his dialogues with loved ones in which he sought to get to the heart of matters interpersonal, I found nothing speaking of real human thought, just fluttering thoughts the real meaning of which I could not grasp. His language seemed pointlessly discordant with his lower-brow essence. Perhaps as a result I found Frank neither plausible or even very interesting. Maybe my bad; maybe not. Maybe no Baby Boomer in the end is either interesting or lovable.
And so, as Lloyd Bentsen might say, I have read Harry Angstrom, I feel that I have known and loved Harry Angstrom, and you, Frank Bascombe, are no Harry Angstrom. Updike's prose was more poetic than Ford's, and God knows there may never have been a popular writer with more academic knowledge of every kind than John Updike. And yet good old Rabbit's voice always rang true to his middle-class character, and could frequently astonish a reader with perception that for all his flaws Rabbit shared thoughts and feelings that the reader had thought unique to himself.
So (as it now is obligatory to say at the beginning of a postmodern sentence), my "takeaway" is that individually or collectively the Bascombe novels are above-average literary fodder, but certainly not the "unbestimmte Nahrung" with which Updike routinely fed his hungry readers.
July 9, 2021
The best book (trilogy) I´ll probably ever read. Totally inspiring and a life long companion towards "end-of-life". That´s for a male just turned 40 and one that very much can relate and find a "wingman" in the life of Frank. Priceless wisdom and joy that will never go away. So glad I took the time.
June 15, 2026
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford is one of The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, just like Independence Day, by the same author, is included on that list, notwithstanding that, it is only 1637th on the Greatest Books of All Time – it seemed to be one of my own Top 200 or so, but now I am not sure, who knows what I will say about it, by the end of this note – you have thousands of reviews of magnum opera from the aforementioned and other web pages on my blog https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20...
7 out of 10
I have written about The Sportswriter https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... ‘When I first started to read The Sportswriter I was turned off by the gloomy, tragic atmosphere of the novel…’ then I thought it is wonderful, when trying it for the first time, and now I am back in between
This novel should be set aside, it may be a barometer, I have been somewhat depressed, so maybe there is that, I should see some specialist – not twenty-two, I understand that the Orange Gorilla who is demolishing The White House has been seen recently by twenty-two specialists, he keeps boasting about his IQ
Whereas they give him these cognitive tests, just like they do after some Knockout in the boxing ring, to see if he can take care of himself, and then they allow him to rule over a country – the once admired greatest democracy, now a lamentable failure in quite a few ways, due to this MAGA section they have there
H.L. Mencken https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... was a fabulous luminary, he said ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard’ among other things, one referring to historians as ‘failed novelists’
‘Frank ids divorced and what I missed out on the first superficial approach is that he is still upbeat and says that- If I would have the possibility to change, I would only have Ralph live and avoid the divorce’ however, we learn from positive psychology that, if divorce is not optimal, neither is a marriage on the rocks…
Indeed, there was this statement that in a way we should cheer on the friend who says he has had a divorce, because that means that the ordeal is about over https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... we have this strange situation:
The happiest people are married, they live longer, more successful lives, then you have the divorced, who live less, but then even worse are those who are married, but their marriages are dysfunctional, it is as if ‘they were in a car crash every single day’, ergo, divorce represents the end of that heinous state of affairs
I am married, it does not work, we stay together only for practical, material reasons, and I guess to share the care for the macaws, reading The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... would be a waste of time here
7 out of 10
I have written about The Sportswriter https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... ‘When I first started to read The Sportswriter I was turned off by the gloomy, tragic atmosphere of the novel…’ then I thought it is wonderful, when trying it for the first time, and now I am back in between
This novel should be set aside, it may be a barometer, I have been somewhat depressed, so maybe there is that, I should see some specialist – not twenty-two, I understand that the Orange Gorilla who is demolishing The White House has been seen recently by twenty-two specialists, he keeps boasting about his IQ
Whereas they give him these cognitive tests, just like they do after some Knockout in the boxing ring, to see if he can take care of himself, and then they allow him to rule over a country – the once admired greatest democracy, now a lamentable failure in quite a few ways, due to this MAGA section they have there
H.L. Mencken https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... was a fabulous luminary, he said ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard’ among other things, one referring to historians as ‘failed novelists’
‘Frank ids divorced and what I missed out on the first superficial approach is that he is still upbeat and says that- If I would have the possibility to change, I would only have Ralph live and avoid the divorce’ however, we learn from positive psychology that, if divorce is not optimal, neither is a marriage on the rocks…
Indeed, there was this statement that in a way we should cheer on the friend who says he has had a divorce, because that means that the ordeal is about over https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... we have this strange situation:
The happiest people are married, they live longer, more successful lives, then you have the divorced, who live less, but then even worse are those who are married, but their marriages are dysfunctional, it is as if ‘they were in a car crash every single day’, ergo, divorce represents the end of that heinous state of affairs
I am married, it does not work, we stay together only for practical, material reasons, and I guess to share the care for the macaws, reading The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... would be a waste of time here
December 5, 2017
After (most of) Irving my favourite American writer.
The Bascombe novels are a kind of Bible, or, according to preference, the Iliad.
Incredibly funny and incredibly deep in the same time, coming along unassumingly, Frank Bascombe's life philosophy being presented as a byproduct of his daily experiences, or as in "The Lay of the Land", his single day experience.
I've started the series with this last one and I was left dumbfounded - never heard of this guy before. How was this even possible?!?
I found myself, my very own life philosophy and quintessence in Frank Bascombe, despite him being a man. What is wrong with me, I must ask? :)
The series take the reader through most of Bascombe's life in 3 stages, we see his strange kids growing and becoming even more strange, we see the relationship to his former wife evolve and his struggles with private and professional choices.
Most of all though it's his voice - the voice of reason and deep humanity that is at the core of the oeuvre.
A humanist book, a great achievement.
There is an epilogue in the form of a new book, called fittingly: "Let me be Frank with You". Recommendable for Frank Bascombe lovers.
The Bascombe novels are a kind of Bible, or, according to preference, the Iliad.
Incredibly funny and incredibly deep in the same time, coming along unassumingly, Frank Bascombe's life philosophy being presented as a byproduct of his daily experiences, or as in "The Lay of the Land", his single day experience.
I've started the series with this last one and I was left dumbfounded - never heard of this guy before. How was this even possible?!?
I found myself, my very own life philosophy and quintessence in Frank Bascombe, despite him being a man. What is wrong with me, I must ask? :)
The series take the reader through most of Bascombe's life in 3 stages, we see his strange kids growing and becoming even more strange, we see the relationship to his former wife evolve and his struggles with private and professional choices.
Most of all though it's his voice - the voice of reason and deep humanity that is at the core of the oeuvre.
A humanist book, a great achievement.
There is an epilogue in the form of a new book, called fittingly: "Let me be Frank with You". Recommendable for Frank Bascombe lovers.
July 6, 2023
I have started the latest and last book of Ford's Frank Bascombe novels. I have read them all, starting with "The Sportswriter". Beautiful writing, following a man through several parts of his life. New York Review of books says "Frank Bascombe's voice on the page is so utterly ingratiating, so Sinatra-like smooth and easygoing, we are happy just to listen to him ruminate."
April 14, 2018
I'd first read Richard Ford's The Sportswriter when it first came out. I remembered enjoying it all those long years ago, so I bought this trilogy to see if it (and the subsequent sequels) were as good as I had once thought. They most definitely are.
February 3, 2019
This (the three volume book) is a great way to begin & finish the three original volumes. I’m now currently reading “Let Me Be Frank With You”
September 3, 2021
I don’t have any explanatory word for my heartily emotional expression after reading such an intriguing texts of a traditional American writer other than ´Great! ´ Further commentary required?
Want to Read
October 14, 2015I think....finally.....I have found a book to follow The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. I think......maybe. It's so hard to follow a book that you cannot get out of your head!!!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews