Tell me why review download7/10/2023 “The two faces of tragedy and comedy are always joined, for me,” says Ford. I wrote this book through the worst of the pandemic, and it was a big tincture of melancholy of not using my life fully enough ![]() But it is a funny book, with Frank and Paul’s dialogue – decades of love contained within – reading at times like a comedy double-act. ![]() The book charts Frank and Paul’s time together in February 2020, just as a new virus is beginning to threaten the world. Why does he think people like the Frank Bascombe books so much? ![]() I tell Ford that when I shared a picture of the new book on social media, there was a lot of excitement. The pun in the title of the last is an indicator of the humour that runs through the series. Then came the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006) and the four novellas collected in Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). And the book we’re talking about today is a particularly exciting one for Ford fans: Be Mine is the fourth – and final – novel featuring Frank Bascombe, his everyman narrator who has charmed readers since Ford’s breakthrough 1984 novel The Sportswriter. He really has gone far from where he started: Ford is one of the most celebrated of living American novelists, both a bestseller and winner of big prizes. And you can begin to think you don’t know where in the hell you are.” “It’s just important to me to have a throughline back to where I started life, because I’ve gotten so far from where I started. ![]() He’s a southern boy at heart, born in Jackson, Mississippi, a mere 200 miles from New Orleans – “I go up there just for dinner sometimes” – so really, this represents coming home. “The thing about living this way is that you think nothing of driving 2,000 miles to reclaim something you’ve left behind.” Richard Ford is talking, via Zoom, about his recent move from Maine, in the northeastern corner of the USA, where he lived when I last spoke to him in 2020, to the southern city of New Orleans.
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