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Independence Day
- Frank Bascombe, Book 2
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 20 hrs and 23 mins
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Publisher's summary
Pulitzer Prize Winner, Fiction 1996
Hailed as a major American novel, Independence Day is a relentlessly thoughtful, heart-wrenching, yet hilarious portrait of an ordinary American man. Wickedly realistic details and dialog entice you to see modern life filtered through the first-person narrator's complex and evolving consciousness. Apparently directionless since his divorce, Frank Bascombe migrates from one non-committal relationship to another. He freely indulges his tendencies to self absorption, over-intellectualization, and neurotic ambivalence. But all of that changes one fateful Fourth of July weekend, when, armed with the Declaration of Independence, he embarks on a mission to save his troubled teenaged son.
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One of the best
- By Jackie on 02-25-24
By: James Patterson, and others
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The Worst of You
- By: Sarah Richards
- Narrated by: Sarah Desjardins
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Original Recording
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In The Worst of You, just-wed architects Timo and Nia flee a murder scene, setting in motion a chain reaction of lies and betrayals that threaten to unravel everything they have built together. Twisted and propulsive, this thriller is told from the alternating perspectives of the couple and those close to them on Williwaw Island, each with their own motive to use the outcome of the murder case to their advantage. When a huge storm sweeps up the coast, trapping everyone on tiny Williwaw Island, it’s a race against time—and the elements — to stop the murderer from striking again.
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Horrible
- By Leslie on 05-13-24
By: Sarah Richards
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The Crimes of Dorian Gray
- By: Arvind Ethan David
- Narrated by: Lexi Underwood, Neil Brown Jr., Richard Schiff, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 42 mins
- Original Recording
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This gripping fictional true crime podcast delves into the story of the enigmatic Dorian Gray, a vigilante who changed the world, rewriting history in the blood of her victims. Her targets were the titans of their era—billionaires, movie stars, politicians. Dorian said they had one thing in common: they had all committed crimes against women. They were rapists, abusers, master manipulators. Dorian left evidence of their heinous offenses with their bodies, and then she vanished without a trace.
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The plot
- By Falfon K Smith Jr. on 04-24-24
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One of Us Is Dead
- By: Jeneva Rose
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt, Hillary Huber, Elizabeth Evans, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Opulence. Sex. Betrayal…sometimes friendship can be deadly. Meet the women of Buckhead—a place of expensive cars, huge houses, and competitive friendships. Who amongst these women will be clever enough to survive Buckhead—and who will wind up dead? They say that friendships can be complex, but no one said it could ever be this deadly.
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Great mystery. Sexually graphic.
- By Sue on 09-04-22
By: Jeneva Rose
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The Package
- By: Sebastian Fitzek
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Original Recording
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Emma is the one that got away. The only survivor of a serial killer known in the tabloids as “The Hairdresser”, because of the trophies he takes from his victims. The police aren't convinced. Nor is her husband. She never actually saw her tormentor properly, but now she recognizes him in every man she sees. Haunted by the horrifying incident and unwanted notoriety, Emma gives up her job as a psychiatrist and retreats from the outside world to recuperate at home, where it’s quiet. Where she can be anonymous and safe. Where no one can hurt her.
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Twisted psychological trip!
- By Drea on 04-29-24
By: Sebastian Fitzek
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The Rip
- By: Holly Craig
- Narrated by: Carly Foxx, Shalom Brune-Franklin
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Luxury villas on hot white sand, views for miles over turquoise water. Flawless hostess Penny gathers guests to an island for her husband’s birthday celebrations. But she soon regrets inviting self-obsessed Eloise. When a child vanishes on the night of the party, their perfect island weekend is ripped apart. Even paradise harbours murky secrets… Has he been taken? Has he drowned? In the panic to find any trace, Penny casts about for someone to blame—even if that person is her own daughter, Rosie. Even clear waters descend to pitch black.
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Intriguing, Engaging, AND BEST NARATORS EVER
- By Hadassah on 03-12-24
By: Holly Craig
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When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed. His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border.
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After the last word, went right back to beginning
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Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too old to manage the family's fertile thousand-acre farm. As each couple struggles with their own tragedies and challenges, they know their father is judging them in light of the weighty inheritance that hovers within their reach.
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good book bad reader
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When Joe Brinson was 16, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana, the setting for this harrowing, transfixing novel by the acclaimed author of Rock Springs. Filled with an abiding sense of love and family, and of the forces that test them to the breaking point, Wildlife is a book whose spare poetry and expansive vision established it as an American classic.
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Beautiful Wildlife
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Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
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Excellent Narrative
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Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway.
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Frank 4
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In Sorry for Your Trouble, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Richard Ford enacts a stunning meditation on memory, love, and loss. “Displaced” returns us to a young man’s Mississippi adolescence, and to a shocking encounter with a young Irish immigrant. “Driving Up” follows an American woman’s late-in-life journey to Canada to bid good-bye to a lost love now facing the end of this life. “The Run of Yourself”, a novella, sees a New Orleans lawyer navigating the difficulties of living beyond his Irish wife’s death....
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Beautifully conceived collection
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After the last word, went right back to beginning
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good book bad reader
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When Joe Brinson was 16, his father moved the family to Great Falls, Montana, the setting for this harrowing, transfixing novel by the acclaimed author of Rock Springs. Filled with an abiding sense of love and family, and of the forces that test them to the breaking point, Wildlife is a book whose spare poetry and expansive vision established it as an American classic.
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Beautiful Wildlife
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Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill Flett drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood, and old age, bewildered by her inability to understand her own role in the unsettled decades of the twentieth century. At last, reflecting on her unobserved and unconventional life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
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Robert Olen Butler's lyrical and poignant collection of stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its impact on the Vietnamese was acclaimed by critics across the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. This edition includes two subsequently published stories - "Salem" and "Missing" - that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey with a return to the jungles of Vietnam.
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RARE AND WONDERFUL STORIES!
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Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.
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A meandering audiobook...
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Maggie and Ira Moran are on a road trip from Baltimore, Maryland, to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania, to attend the funeral of a friend. Along the way, they reflect on the state of their marriage, its trials, and its triumphs - through their quarrels, their routines, and their ability to tolerate each other's faults with patience and affection.
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This novel has earned all the recognition ---
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Martin Dressler
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Martin Dressler, son of an immigrant cigar maker, believes he can achieve anything if he works hard enough. At the turn of the century, he rises from the shadows of his father’s shop in New York City to become a powerful entrepreneur and builder of hotels. But, as he contemplates this land of almost limitless opportunity, his plans grow impossibly grand. Through the curve of Martin’s spectacular rise and eventual downfall in the business world, his tale remains a uniquely American one. Martin may not always control an empire, but he will always be able to dream.
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It Builds a Great Foundation
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Rock Springs
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In these 10 exquisite stories, first published by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1987 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Richard Ford mines literary gold from the wind-scrubbed landscape of the American West - and from the guarded hopes and gnawing loneliness of the people who live there: a refugee from justice driving across Wyoming with his daughter and an unhappy girlfriend in a stolen, cranberry-colored Mercedes; a boy watching his family dissolve in a night of tragicomic violence.
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Superb, Picturesque Stories in Wyoming & Montana
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Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion’s widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke out whatever meager promise isn’t already boarded up. Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom from the Empire Grill, an opportunity of his youth that has become the albatross of his life.
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Hugely Enjoyable
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Power Down
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A major North American hydroelectric dam is blown up and the largest off-shore oil field in this hemisphere is destroyed in a brutal, coordinated terrorist attack. But there was one factor that the terrorists didn't take into account when they struck the Capitana platform off the coast of Colombia—slaughtering much of the crew and blowing up the platform—and that was the Capitana crew chief Dewey Andreas. Dewey, former Army Ranger and Delta, survives the attack, rescuing as many of his men as possible. But the battle has just begun.
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WOW.COULD NOT PUT THIS ONE DOWN. MUST READ!
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Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
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It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to the grand stage of New York City. It is the era of mambo, and the Castillo brothers, workers by day, become stars of the dance halls by night, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth, exuberance, love, and freedom―a golden time that decades later is remembered with nostalgia and deep affection.
By: Oscar Hijuelos, and others
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
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It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.
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A World I DON'T Ever Want to Escape From.
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Virginia Miner, a 50-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.
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Fascinating
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Ironweed
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Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally – and fatally – dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present.
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Darkly Lovely
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The Reivers
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- Unabridged
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One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque story that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucas Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey.
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4 days in the life of an eleven year old
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By: William Faulkner
What listeners say about Independence Day
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JennEric
- 04-17-16
Certainly not deserving of the Pulitzer!
Descriptive, eloquently well written but flat and a bit boring. Are the characters interesting ? is this a story worth reading about? Not really!
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- Evan Perlo
- 02-06-15
Outstanding narrator
This is the kind of reading voice that makes audiobooks a uniquely pleasurable and enriching art form. A great piece of writing enhanced by an exceptional reader.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Luke Christiano
- 08-23-16
Everyman
I loved the ability to capture a common man and bring him through his typical American life in such an articulate and emotional manner. I would never dream of spending pages on seemingly endless monotonous activity with such a riveting style. I had trouble taking breaks from the flow of the narrative and narrator. Superb.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Linda B.
- 07-18-12
Enjoyable and thought provoking but too long
After reading "Canada" I downloaded this book. This was very different in style. I did enjoy it but found it repetitive and overly long.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Hatfield Frank
- 03-24-16
outstanding
the author is a master of character development and insights into human nature. highly recommended
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1 person found this helpful
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- Bv5678
- 01-07-09
Great Book - Great Narrator
Another great book from Richard Ford. Every one in the Frank Bascombe series is excellent. I don't understand how every review is not 4-5 stars. If I'm not mistaken it won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN-Faulkner Award. Richard Poe's narration is excellent too.
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17 people found this helpful
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- David Giard
- 06-24-23
Ford successfully continues the story of nihilist
"Independence Day" by Richard Ford
We first met Frank Bascombe in Richard Ford's 1986 novel "The Sportswriter." Ford returned to the character in 1995 with "Independence Day."
Frank is older and has left the world of sportswriting to become a real estate agent in New Jersey suburbia. He has a decent career, an ex-wife, a pretty girlfriend, a stable financial situation, a nice home (bought from his ex-wife), and a troubled teenage son.
While this book provides no straightforward plot, it takes the reader through a holiday weekend inside and outside Frank's mind as he navigates the different parts of his life.
He begins by showing houses to a prospective customer who cannot make up his mind after dozens of showings and accuses Frank of everything from dishonesty to homosexuality.
We see Frank struggle with his romantic relationship. Girlfriend Sally does not know how to handle Frank's attempts to keep her at arm's length.
We see his frustration with his ex-wife, who has remarried a man that both Frank and his son Paul abhor.
And we travel with Frank and Paul to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame as they try and fail to establish a decent father-son bond.
Ford creates a memorable character and reveals that character through his thoughts. The entire book is written in the first person and the present tense, giving readers the impression they are eavesdropping on Frank's thoughts as they pass through his mind. Frank is drifting through his privileged life, trying to convince himself that he is content.
Outwardly, Frank is calm and polite - even to those who are rude and abusive. He almost always says the right thing; when he does not, he is immediately aware of his mistake. But inwardly, he despises nearly everyone, holding them in contempt. He is a nihilist who observes and interprets the world but seems to exist outside of it. He combines cynicism and angst so that the reader feels sympathy for him. A lifelong Democrat, Frank is frustrated by the poor 1988 campaign run by Michael Dukakis (Historical Note: Bush handily defeated Dukakis in the fall election.)
Anyone else would long since have abandoned the racist, unreasonable husband who refuses to like any of the houses Frank shows him, but Frank takes it all in stride.
The road trip with the intelligent but troubled son is the most interesting part of the story. Paul has been disruptive and violent lately, including assaulting a security guard and striking his stepfather with an oar. Paul shows symptoms of autism and Tourette syndrome. His nearly constant sarcasm places him on the wrong side of the line between funny and annoying.
Frank attempts to connect with him, but his own faults make this problematic. The father is self-absorbed and indecisive. Within 36 hours, Frank considers asking his ex-wife to remarry him, confesses his love to his girlfriend, tries to pick up the young chef at a Cooperstown motel, and drunk dials his old sweetheart.
The story finishes on July 4 - American Independence Day - but it is also about Frank's struggle for Independence from his past.
"Independence Day" won Ford the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. It is a classic episodic novel told with humor and sensitivity.
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- KylePs80
- 08-25-15
A Typical Man's Typical Weekend, Flecked with Moments of True Beauty
Read this book if you want to understand how middle-aged, introspective, divorced men find beauty and the will to go on despite the common man's worty and mundane existence. Do not read this book if you're not willing to tolerate the narrative passing through as many hours as the recording is long (or nearly). I loved every minute of it. The voice and language are works of true artistry and the narrator is incredible.
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2 people found this helpful
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- MS
- 07-19-20
Fantastic
A great book. I’ve read it twice and now listened to it twice. Richard Ford is an astoundingly gifted writer and Frank Bascombe is a terrifically depicted character.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joe Kraus
- 09-23-18
An Exemplar on a Surprising Ethnic Type of Novel
I’ve nursed a theory for some time that it should be possible to define a category of ethnic literature around the WASP experience. We’ve done a lot to theorize African-American or Jewish-American literature, and we have given a lot of critical attention to the Fitzgerald-John O’Hara-Updike-Carver school of authors, but I don’t think we’ve thought of them as an ethnic group. They’ve been the “American” school against which other, accented figures get contrasted.
In any case, I start my theorizing with an observation out of Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited,” but it could be in any number of places in Fitzgerald: the idea is that much of what concerns him is ‘dissipation,’ the phenomenon of a gifted character making something into nothing. O’Hara certainly picks up on that notion in Appointment in Samarra, and the same notion is at the heart of the Rabbit novels; Rabbit Angstrom starts with something, a social place and the implicit promise of success, but he keeps fumbling it away. Along the way, such authors allow that experience to become entwined with the experience of America itself, to have them embody an idea of American decline, or at least – going back to Gatsby – the decline of a certain kind of middle-class, white and Protestant America. (Quick footnote: I know that Fitzgerald and O’Hara were not WASPs themselves, but they both so aspired to the status that they wrote, literally, the book on how to do it.)
I say all of that because, if I ever decide to prove that point, I can’t think of a better novel to focus on than this one. It’s excellently written, but I feel like uttering an “of course” when I say that. Ford is a master stylist, and – though I don’t hear it as much as I guess I’d expect to – Frank Bascomb is the clear heir to Rabbit. I admire Updike as an understated stylist (and also, in his Bech books, as an over-the-top stylist) and I think Ford can stand right next to him. If writers were law firms where talented senior partners brought in talented junior partners in their same mold, I can see doing business with Updike and Ford, and I intend it as a compliment to both.
Instead, what I take from this novel is less its acute exploration of mid-life self-recrimination and more the degree to which it asserts one man’s experience of life’s challenges as metonymy for a larger national reimagining. Take away the deep literary skill in play – which is, of course, the reason to read the novel in the first place – and this is all about a man who realizes he faces a reckoning as a father and as a numbed soul as ‘independence day” approaches. He takes his son on a road trip to the various sports halls of fame, to places against which all of us fall short, and he insists his son read Emerson along the way. It’s a mini-crisis, or an extension of the greater crisis, that young Paul can’t seem to find any use for Emerson except – right before the accident that resets the parameters of Frank’s life – to tear the pages out of the book. And it’s partial evidence of Frank’s moving past his “existence period” that he can begin to imagine Paul reading Emerson more carefully, that he can imagine Paul coming into his American birthright.
Once you look for such evidence, it’s plentiful and generally unsubtle. Even the epilogue portion of the novel deals with the ebbing of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams’s influence, on Frank’s casual insistence that he not only hasn’t forgotten them but that he thinks of them with a kind of intensity that surprises the neighbor-friend who brings the subject up himself.
All in all, Frank is ineffectively seeking his personal independence against the backdrop of the country’s uncertain stagger in that direction as well. The novel takes place in the months before the Dukakis/George H. Bush election which, though that feels like an achingly innocent political choice, looks to Frank like a choice between a liberal figure who’s mostly surface against a generally selfish and unreflective conservatism. (Again, that makes the book feel downright naïve next to what we see in the current administration.) Frank retains his strength and his ideals, but he has little he can apply that strength to and he has almost no sense of how to pursue those ideals.
I can see a case where someone might say that we’ve heard enough from privileged white men who can’t figure out what to do with the good fortune of their birthright. To that I’d say, first, there should always be room for voices of this excellence. The context of this one has changed enough that, where it might have been a contender for great American novel status 20 years ago, I think it’s probably worth downgrading it to really-good-American novel today. But still, this is a novel as excellent as what Updike was doing, and that’s a rare enough fruit that have to care about it if we’re going to care about literature at all.
I’d say as well, though, and this takes me back to where I began, that Ford isn’t insisting that we see his story as the only American story. Everyone who attempts what my old professor Julia Stern taught me to call auto-American-biography has license to put him or herself forward as representatively American. As readers, we need to see not just the soloist but the entire choir that emerges. If we set this work alongside the other excellent work of its era – alongside the best of Philip Roth or Toni Morrison – we can begin to see it in a light that continues to do it justice. There’s white privilege at the heart of this, and there’s a thoughtful sense of diminishment (or dissipation) that, in the unthinking hands of Trumpdom is appalling. But at bottom, this is a story of someone who wants the greatness that this country promised. If we grant him the standing to represent a larger group around him, if we allow him to stand as “ethnic” in the sense of representing a particular group experience in the coming together of America, then I think his voice has a clearer place.
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