Richard Ford captured the hopes and sorrows of everyman Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. These novels secured Ford's reputation as a master of American fiction; by making Frank's hopes, disappointments and resentments urgent and familiar, Ford articulated the preoccupations of a generation of men.
In the four trenchant and very funny novellas that comprise Let Me Be Frank with You, Frank Bascombe has retired from his career as a real-estate agent, has sold his oceanfront house and now lives in an inland New Jersey town. He eats All-Bran for breakfast, brushes his teeth regularly to avoid "monkey's closet" breath and is facing his twilight years in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, victims of which his wife, Sally, now counsels.
The triggering event for each story thrusts the past into Frank's present. Throughout these novellas, Ford emphasizes the passage of time and the devastation it wreaks, altering even the most familiar people and places. Hurricane Sandy, central in every story, serves as a metaphor for the unavoidable ravages of age. Frank is preoccupied by senescence: an acquaintance's efforts to stay it through plastic surgery, his own guilt and unease that his life has been left untouched while others' lives have suffered, his awareness of his own mortality.
Despite the sober subject matter, Frank is as bitingly funny as ever. His choice observations and the stories he tells reveal a man whose limitations and failings coexist with soaring attempts to make sense of a world undone by fate. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer