Critical Overview
Reviewers in general regarded Independence Day as a worthy successor to Ford’s earlier novel featuring Frank Bascombe, The Sportswriter. According to the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Independence Day “is an often poetic, sometimes searing, sometimes hilarious account” of Bascombe’s life around the Fourth of July: “Frank struggles through the long weekend with a mixture of courage, self-knowledge and utter foolishness that makes him a kind of 1980s Everyman.” In Newsweek, Jeff Giles shares this enthusiasm for Frank Bascombe, describing him as “a great mythic American character” in what is “a long, exhausting but finally exhilarating sequel to The Sportswriter.” In Giles’s view, the novel picks up steam when Bascombe arrives at his ex-wife’s house and starts out on the trip with his son: “The halls-of-fame sequence is a genuinely heartbreaking study of a screwed-up father trying to reach his screwed-up kid.”
In Time, Paul Gray also focuses on the character of Bascombe, describing him as an “entertaining storyteller . . . [whose] conviction that it is possible to behave honorably—even while selling real estate—and to be useful to his fellow citizens commands respect.” However, Gray comments that Bascombe “has a way of attracting misery to those around him” and does not seem especially aware of this fact, making him “a bigger mystery to the reader than he is to himself.”
Some reviewers had reservations about the plot, commenting that there were too few actual events to sustain interest in the narrative. For example, Charles Johnson, in the New York Times Book Review, writes:
[T]here is only the thinnest of story lines in the 451 pages of Independence Day. The novel often bogs down in repetitive descriptions of place and setting. Some events—Frank’s effort to collect his rent from the McLeods, his arrival at a motel in Connecticut just after a killing has occurred and the mystery of the realtor’s murder—lead nowhere.
Johnson does, however, acknowledge the “brilliant character sketches” in the book and concludes:
Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape, but he has done so with a wry wit and a fin de siècle wisdom that is very much his own.
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