Independence Day by Richard Ford
Independence Day by Richard Ford. New York: Vintage Books, 1995, 451 pages.
Americans are fond of wishing one another a Happy-- New Year, Thanksgiving, or whatever holiday it may be (except for Christmas, prefaced with the hope that it will be “Merry,” an amped-up synonym for “happy.”) The other outlier is the sacredly secular celebration of the America’s birthday, marked not so much by a cheery greeting but a warning: “Have a safe and sane Fourth of July,” meaning don’t blow your fingers off igniting a cherry bomb or drunkenly drive headlong into a tractor trailer on I-95.
Safety and sanity are just a pair of several concepts affecting the protagonist/narrator of Independence Day. Frank Bascombe, a former sportswriter turned real estate salesman, describes his “existence period,” the post-divorce years during which he has been marking time in Haddam, New Jersey. Readers may have think they’ve been on this suburban road before – the male mid-life crisis with all of its associated angst and self-pity - but it’s a pretty good bet they’ve never traveled in such an emotionally gripping way before. For one thing, Frank doesn’t wallow. And he doesn’t whine. What he does is make us laugh and brings us to the brink of tears as he show us characters – including Frank himself - whom we sometimes loathe yet deeply care about on a fundamentally human level.
The time frame of this novel is spelled out in the title, specifically the Fourth of July Weekend of 1988, against the backdrop of a contentious Presidential election campaign, along with other time-capsule allusions dropping in from time to time. This extra layer to the narrative reminds us that Frank and the people with whom he interacts are part of a larger world, in which we all desperately aspire to find our appropriate place. Other literary illusions include the historians de Tocqueville and Carl Becker, and most notably Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” its relationship to the concept of “independence” not quite as facile as one may believe.
Frank applies Emerson’s oft-quoted line “To be great is to be misunderstood,” more than once to his teenaged son, Paul, with whom Frank plans to spend some quality time during the holiday weekend touring the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. A jagged edginess roughs up the optimism of the upcoming trip, as Paul has recently undergone dramatic changes in his appearance, along with slipping into petty crimes, exhibiting bizarre behavior such as barking like a dog, and presenting incomprehensible non sequiturs as jokes. Paul, along with his younger, gamine sister Clarissa, live in a tony Connecticut community with their custodial parent, Frank’s former wife, Ann who has married “up” to a older gent of the country club set (though Frank himself is far from financially strapped.)
Personal problems in his “existence period” are a different story. Frank still carries a low-burning torch for Ann, though the emotion is actually nostalgia in that he wistfully pines for a life that could have been, intensified by the ever-present grief of having lost a child in the couple’s earlier years. Other deaths haunt him as well, especially that of one of Frank’s real estate associates with whom he had a brief but affectionate affair and whose unsolved murder has occurred two months previous to the opening of the novel. Frank’s relationship with his current flame, Sally, is passionate and warm, yet remains tentative, with neither party willing to take the next step. Professionally, Frank is contending with the Markhams, potential home-buyers from Vermont who profess a desire for a fresh start but lack the will to choose a house and close the deal. Similarly passive-aggressive is another couple who with near-hostility evades Frank’s attempts to collect the rent. Frank’s business partner, Karl, who operates their popular hot dog and root beer stand, has been showing unsettling trigger-happy signs in his real or imagined sense that criminals are casing the joint for a robbery.
These are the times that try Frank’s soul. He does, nevertheless, manage to drive to Connecticut to pick up Paul, but on the way witnesses the aftermath of a killing at a motel. This echoes the homicide tangential to Frank’s personal life, and perhaps thematically foreshadows the pivotal event in Cooperstown at which everything hits the fan (but does not in any way involve murder nor Fourth of July fireworks.)
Ford’s writing throughout the book gleams like a sparkler, but in the concluding section of the novel it becomes spectacular and even more compelling. As might well be expected, the author’s word paintings out of East Coast landscapes are evocative, but more so his poignant portraits of real people: a spot-on accurate portrayal of disabled young adults and their care-givers entering a Denny’s, a sardonic view of macho truck drivers impatiently waiting for Frank to get off a public pay phone (remember, this takes place in the pre-cell phone era), and a comical view of some Canadian bus passengers at a rest stop on their way to an Atlantic City casino. Even more impressive is Richard Ford’s insight, displayed in Frank’s uncommon sense of self-knowledge in his “existence period,” and realistic scenes dialogue and behavior,opening up a wider vision of the human condition:
“[W]hat’s amiss, if anything, is not much different from what’s amiss with all of us at one time or another– we’re not happy, we don’t know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better.” Throughout the novel are hints about coming to grips with forces we can and cannot control, and keen observations about the limits of independence and interdependence.
Born in Mississippi in 1944, Richard Ford was educated at the University of Michigan. Among his highly-acclaimed works are short story collections and several other novels, including the two Frank Bascombe novels book-ending this one: The Sportswriter (1986) and The Lay of the Land (2006.) Independence Day won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995.
When an interviewer for the Paris Review asked Richard Ford what he hoped to accomplish with his writing, he answered, “At the end of my novels I certainly want the reader to say Boy-o-boy. (That is, in an admiring way.)”
I only have two regrets: that I hadn’t discovered Richard Ford’s novels until now and that this book review doesn’t even begin to do him justice but –“Boy-o-boy!”
