broken homes); his ex-wife is now unhappily (so it would appear) remarried; Bascombe’s stepbrother Irv Ornstein is divorced twice and his second wife wants no contact with him. The unstable Markhams are on their second marriages, with Joe’s son from his first marriage possessing a conviction for armed robbery; Sally Caldwell’s husband, Wally, disappeared twenty years earlier and has not been heard of since. Marriage is thus presented as a risky undertaking, with the chances of success small and the possibility of lasting pain large. Irv Ornstein resists making any commitment to his current girlfriend, fearing that if he does he will lose his own identity and regret it for the rest of his life. When Irv shows Bascombe an old black and white family snapshot that he has carried around with him for years, it strikes the reader (and Bascombe, who calls it “[Irv’s] precious artifact”) as a relic from a bygone age. The family unit may once have been the foundation unit of society, but it can no longer lay claim to such a position.

With neither faith in God nor family to sustain him, Bascombe has cobbled together a kind of private, secular faith in the value of independence, which he has carefully cultivated during what he calls his Existence Period, the time of stability that followed the turbulence caused by the death of his first son and his subsequent divorce. But he has paid a price for his independence in separateness from others. Although he is helpful and considerate to people, he has guarded himself too carefully and lacks any really intimate relationships that might nourish his heart. He does not believe that he could ever marry again and refers to himself as a “suspicious bachelor.” He has convinced himself that he is “more or less self-directed and happy,” but the reader guesses that his assessments of himself are not always accurate. His ex-wife Ann, for example, says that he “may be the most cynical man in the world.”

However, toward the end of the novel, after Paul’s accident, a new quality enters Bascombe’s life that has not been seen before. It is hope. Just as Paul is about to be airlifted to the hospital, Bascombe observes Ann shaking hands with Irv Ornstein. He cannot hear over the sound of the turning rotors of the helicopter, but he sees Ann’s lips moving and Irv seeming to mouth back what she is saying: “Hope, hope, hope, hope, hope.” They are of course referring to Paul’s injury, hoping that it is not quite as serious as they fear it may be. (Their hope is rewarded.) But the hope seems to extend beyond this narrow meaning to Bascombe’s life as a whole. When he talks to Sally about Paul’s accident, he tells her of “some odd feeling of peculiar and not easily explainable hope” that extends to optimism about the future of his relationship with Sally and the possibility that they might actually make a commitment to each other. It is as if the shock of the injury to Paul has blasted away from Bascombe his carefully cultivated stance of detachment and forced him to become more real, open, and honest. He repeats his new-found sentiment the next day, as he looks back on the call he made to Sally from a dark gas station in the village of Long Eddy, New York:

I could sense like a faint, sweet perfume in the night the possibility of better yet to come, only I had no list of particulars to feel better about, and not much light on my horizon except for a keyhole hope to try to make it brighter.

The next day, Independence Day, Bascombe has yet another realization, this time about his relationship with his son, that “yesterday may have cleaned our air and accounts and opened, along with wounds, an unexpected window for hope to go free.”

Bascombe, of course, still has much to learn, and in the later stages of the novel, a new approach to living makes its appearance at the periphery of his life. It is an approach that does not involve trying to control the way things work out. This is relevant for Bascombe since when Paul sustained his injury, his carefully laid plans for the weekend went badly awry. This was not the outcome he was planning for. There is a foreshadowing of this sense that life is not within one’s control, however hard one tries, at the beginning of Chapter 10, when Bascombe is awakened early in the morning in his room at the Deerslayer Inn by the sound of a loud radio coming from outside. There is a talk show in progress, and a caller named Bob says the following:

You know, Jerry, the truth is I just began to realize I didn’t care what happened to me, you know? Worry and worry about making your life come out right, you know? Regret everything you say or do, everything seems to sabotage you, then you try to quit sabotaging yourself. But then that’s a mistake. Finally you have to figure a lot’s out of your control, right?

Bascombe merely reports this without commenting on it, but another key moment comes almost at the end of the novel, when he watches four parachutists land as part of the Fourth of July celebrations. He watches them “careening to earth within five seconds, landing semi-gracefully with a hop-skip-jump close by the Dutch dance floor.” He marvels at how they are able to jump from “the old safety, the ordinary and predictable, which makes a swan dive into invisible empty air seem perfect, lovely, the one thing that’ll do.” These images of falling are a metaphor for letting go rather than holding on for dear life to all the props and supports with which the average person surrounds himself. It is a kind of independence, a flowing in the moment without care of past or future. Bascombe comments on the parachutists, and the implied metaphor of letting go, that he would never consider doing this himself: “I . . . would always find a reason not to risk it . . . I’m no hero.” But the reader may at this point once more find that Bascombe is what literary critics call an unreliable narrator; what he says about himself is not always the way things really are. After all, letting go is part of what he has been urging Paul to do, since Paul is irrationally clinging to the memory of things that happened in the long-ago past and is also busying himself watching himself thinking. The truth is that by the end of the novel, Bascombe has become much more open to real communication with people, which involves letting go of fixed concepts and being willing to change.

On the very last page of the novel there is yet another key moment. Late at night Bascombe is awakened by his telephone ringing. The person at the end of the line does not identify himself and just mumbles a few unintelligible sounds. But Bascombe responds by saying he is glad the person has called, and then says, “Let me hear your thinking. I’ll try to add a part to the puzzle. It can be simpler than you think.” This suggests his openness to communication not just with the people he knows but with anonymous voices and minds everywhere, as if he is more ready to absorb and respond to the stream of life as it occurs moment to moment, forming ever-new patterns that are held for a time and then pass on to something new. Bascombe may or may not be a hero, but it will surely seem to most readers that he is learning how to live in a new way, a way that will lead him to new destinations and places that perhaps he has never even imagined for himself. The parachutist jumps because he has trust and can leave the old and the familiar behind; Bascombe, although he may tell readers otherwise, is in fact in the process of suiting up, ready to take the plunge into the unknown, letting the winds of time and change uphold him and place him where he needs to be.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on Independence Day, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

The psychological and spiritual journey of Ford’s suburban Everyman, Frank Bascombe, progresses further in Independence Day, the author’s most richly developed novel. Five years have passed, and Frank is now forty-four, and his son, Paul, briefly introduced in The Sportswriter as a tenderhearted ten-year-old who tries to contact his dead brother by carrier pigeon, is now a troubled teen who has been arrested for shoplifting. Paul is also prone to emit “unexpected barking noises,” and he spends a great deal of his time “thinking he’s thinking,” that is, monitoring his thoughts in an attempt to gain understanding and control of his life. Like The Sportswriter, this novel also takes place over a holiday weekend. Its events begin on a Friday and end on Monday, the 4th of July, 1988. This time it is the nation’s birthday that marks an important passage in the life of a Ford character. As Frank says, it is “a weekend when my own life seems at a turning or at least a curving point.” The 4th of July/election year setting also provides Ford with ample opportunity to render the state of American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century; and Independence Day is clearly the novelist’s most insightful commentary to date on contemporary life, with particular emphasis upon the dissolution of those important human connections long sustained by families and communities. A major portion of the plot involves an automobile trip that Frank and Paul take to the basketball and baseball halls of fame as part of the absent father’s attempt to bond with the son he feels is rapidly slipping away from him. That Frank chooses this quintessentially American pilgrimage—the 4th of July, the possibilities of the open road, the halls of fame— as his means of bonding with Paul demonstrates the extent to which Ford’s protagonist embraces suburban America’s ideals even as his own experiences reveal the culture’s many failures and breakdowns.

Frank’s own life has changed considerably over the five-year period. His ex-wife, Ann (he now uses her first name), remarried and moved with Frank’s two children from Haddam, New Jersey, to Connecticut, after which Frank moved into the house formerly owned by Ann and quit his job as a sportswriter to become a “Residential Specialist” for a real estate firm. As a result of these events, Frank has entered a phase of his life that is even more passive than his life as a sportswriter. He refers to this phase as “the Existence Period,” which implies, among other things, a midlife willingness “to let matters go as they go and see what happens.” In Independence Day, Frank’s “relocation”—new home and new point of view—as well as his new job in an industry that supposedly stresses the notion that “location is everything” are extremely significant in expressing Ford’s concern with the question of what it really means to locate oneself and gain one’s independence in a complex and often dangerous world.

As the novel begins, we see that life in still-quite-prosperous Haddam has been somewhat devalued, along with its real estate. Crime and violence have spread even to this once-quiet suburb. The modern world is a dangerous place, and there seems to be no escape from life’s randomness. Frank himself has been mugged, his neighbors burglarized, and a colleague/ex-girlfriend raped and murdered. Haddam, in short, has failed to protect its residents from the violence and uncertainty of the world. It is a community on the edge; or, as Frank expresses it: “there’s a new sense of a wild world being just beyond our perimeter, an untallied apprehension among our residents, one I believe they’ll never get used to, one they’ll die before accommodating.” As in Ford’s other novels, there is once again a strong sense of the marginality of human existence, a marginality that Frank, once a writer, understands more keenly than most of his neighbors. The Existence Period is Frank’s newest way of coping with life’s unpredictability and with his own feeling of being “waaaay out there at the edge.”

According to Frank, selling real estate is the “ideal occupation” for someone gliding along in the Existence Period. Frank regards the real estate profession, like sports-writing, as a peripheral occupation, as “being on the periphery of the business community.” Frank explains that “the one gnostic truth of real estate” is “that people never find or buy the house they say they want.” Instead, “The premise is that you’re presented with what you might’ve thought you didn’t want, but what’s available, whereupon you give in and start finding ways to feel good about it and yourself.” To Frank, this scheme makes perfect sense: “Why should you only get what you think you want, or be limited by what you can simply plan on? Life’s never like that, and if you’re smart you’ll decide it’s better the way it is.” Being a realtor also provides Frank with the perfect position from which to observe the “dislocatedness” so prevalent in modern suburban life. As a realtor he must constantly deal with people who, like himself, are trying to find their place, to locate themselves; but he soon discovers that no one is really at home, that in a sense we are all homeless nomads searching desperately for what he refers to as that “homey connectedness.” Always an astute observer of contemporary American society, Ford finds the realty profession to be the ideal vehicle for commenting on the rootlessness and sense of longing that are characteristic of an increasingly mobile population.

Frank’s view of reality and of realty, his Existence Period philosophy that we seldom get what we plan on and might as well learn to accept the fact, is dramatized in a comical episode involving a couple from Vermont, Joe and Phyllis Markham, who are searching for a dream house that does not exist in the Haddam market. The episode also points to the disintegration of families and communities in American culture, as well as to a general pattern of rootlessness. The Markhams’ lives have followed an all-too-familiar pattern in a society in which families and communities are dissolving. They were each married to another, but “spouses wandered off with other people’s spouses; their kids got busily into drugs, got pregnant, got married, then disappeared to California or Canada or Tibet or Wiesbaden.” The middle-aged Joe and Phyllis reinvented themselves, found each other, married, and built comfortable lives in Vermont; but, like so many restless Americans, they eventually decided to pull up stakes in search of a dream. Now they find themselves living in a motel and running out of money. Their “predicament of homelessness” is emphatically suggested by their beat-up, borrowed Nova with the “muddy bumper sticker that says ANESTHETISTS ARE NOMADS.” On a “rainy summer morning” with “the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in,” Frank prepares to show his clients a house “in the Haddam area,” a suburb of a suburb, so to speak. Joe Markham, however, makes clear just how important location is to him: “I don’t want to live in an area. . . . Nobody ever said the Vermont area, or the Aliquippa area. . . . They just said the places.” Frank views Joe as a man “who’s come to the sudden precipice of what’s left of life a little quicker than he knows how to cope with.” Frustrated after showing the Markhams forty-five houses, Frank tries to convince them to see things from his point of view and to settle for a house which, while below their expectations in a number of ways, realistically represents the best that they can expect for their money. However, the house is not actually in Haddam, the most desired location, and, to make matters worse, it has a minimum security prison in its backyard. Selling “the positive aspects of close-by prison living” requires the realtor’s best attempts at “pseudo-communication.” Although the prison behind the fence is an all-too-real reminder of the dangers lurking just beyond the perimeters of suburban life, Frank tries to minimize its importance with the less-than-comforting reminder that “No one knows his neighbors in the suburbs anyway. It’s not like Vermont.” In spite of himself, the cantankerous Joe Markham seems ready to surrender to the influence of Frank’s Existence Period philosophy. Even before being shown the house, he ironically announces: “I’ve completely quit becoming. . . . I’m not out on the margins where new discoveries take place anymore.” His poor wife, Phyllis, perhaps realizing that they have, in fact, reached the edge of their possibilities, unenthusiastically resigns herself to the thought that “maybe no one gets the house they want.”

Although Frank’s passive, stoical life in the Existence Period may help him to cope with disappointment and uncertainty, and in so doing provide him with a false sense of independence from life’s travails, such a view of the world definitely has its drawbacks. Most notably, as he is well aware, the view can result in “physical isolation and emotional disengagement…which cause trouble equal to or greater than the problems” which it solves. As he explains, “[I]t is one of the themes of the Existence Period that interest can mingle successfully with uninterest … intimacy with transience, caring with the obdurate uncaring.” Later, he confesses that “intimacy had begun to matter less to me.” A certain disinterest or uncaring is often evident in Frank’s dealings with others, particularly the homeless Markhams. Even more significantly, however, his emotional detachment is shown by his willingness to allow a satisfying romantic relationship with his lady friend, Sally Caldwell, to end without the least bit of resistance on his part. In fact, he admits to Sally that at times he feels “beyond affection’s grasp.” Most important, Frank may even sense and fear that, in addition to physical distance, an emotional distance is gradually separating him from his son, Paul. His ex-wife, Ann, views him as a “half-hearted parent” and suggests that he should think of his children “as a form of self-discovery.” By the end of the novel, Ann’s advice proves prophetic.

Frank plans the 4th of July/halls of fame weekend trip in order to connect with Paul and help the boy to find his way in the world, but the trip ends up being more a journey of discovery for the father than it is for the son. Frank has brought along two “key ‘texts’ for communicating” with Paul on this “voyage meant to instruct,” Emerson’s “Self- Reliance” and Carl Becker’s The Declaration of Independence. Frank explains: “The impulse to read Self-Reliance is significant here, as is the holiday itself—my favorite secular one for being public and for its implicit goal of leaving us only as it found us: free.” Believing that “independence is . . . what [Paul] lacks—independence from whatever holds him captive: memory, history, bad events he struggles with, can’t control, but feels he should,” Frank hopes to initiate his son into some of the more useful tenets of his own Existence Period philosophy. But perhaps it is Frank’s own gradual emergence from the Existence Period, his growing realization that “laissez-faire is not precisely the same as independence,” that “independence and isolation [are] not the same,” which allows him to embark on this journey that will take both Paul and himself “From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence.”

Frank’s pairing of the words “unity” and “independence” is an important one, for it is evidence of his intuitive understanding that true freedom requires strengthening, not severing, ties with others. In fact, Frank tries to drive this point home to Paul by explaining that the founding fathers “wanted to be free to make new mistakes, not just keep making the same old ones over and over as separate colonies. . . . [Thus] they decided to band together and be independent and were willing to sacrifice some controls they’d always had in hopes of getting something better—in their case, better trade with the outside world.” The importance of strengthening ties, of “establishing a greater sense of connectedness,” is further emphasized in the novel in a variety of subtle ways: by the pair of tiny ribbon bows which Clarissa, Frank’s daughter, gives to her father and brother before they embark on their journey; by the bow tie pasta which Sally Caldwell prepares especially for Frank; and by a seemingly offhand reference which Frank makes to “the poignant line” in Thornton Wilder’s nostalgic Our Town. Wilder’s decidedly American play, of course, is also about making connections—to a family, to a community, and to a nation—and the importance of such connections is expressed by that play’s leitmotif, “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds.” While Our Town depicts a simpler life in the past, Ford’s equally American novel depicts “the perilous character of life” in the present time when the ties are becoming frayed, that is, when the most important human connections are in a state of dissolution.

If true independence requires solidarity with others, it also requires surrendering the desire for control and accepting one’s connection to the past as a useful guide to living in the present. In his own life, Frank has had his difficulties in all three areas. He maintains a posture of detachment from others; he vacillates between a desire to control life and a desire to surrender to it, and he would like to jettison much of his past. As Frank puts it, “[W]hen you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it. (My son Paul may be an exception.)” In The Sportswriter, Frank had observed that “You can get detached from your beginnings . . . just by life itself, fate, the tug of the ever-present.” There is a scene at the Deerslayer Inn in Cooperstown in which Frank discovers a link to the past of which he, as much as Paul, is a captive. The bad memories of a failed marriage and of other events which he regrets and would like to forget all return when he finds an old copy of a book of short stories that he once published. He looks at the photograph on the dust jacket depicting an image of himself as a young writer, an image which may remind the reader of Harry Quinn, a man who chose to reject the past and to live in the moment, and which also serves as a reminder of Ford’s view of the writer’s “marginality in our culture”: “I take a look at the . . . author photo . . . a young man, though this time with a completely unwarranted confidence etched in his skinny mouth, ludicrously holding a beer and smoking a cigarette (!), an empty sun-lit (possibly Mexican) barroom and tables behind, staring fixedly at the camera as though he meant to say: ‘Yep, you just about have to live out here in the wild margins to get this puppy done the way God intended. And you probably couldn’t hack it, if you want to know the gospel.’ And I, of course, couldn’t hack it; chose, in fact, a much easier puppy on a much less wild margin.”

Although Frank’s peripheral, Existence Period life in the suburbs of New Jersey is considerably “less wild” than either Harry’s Mexico or the young Frank’s marginalized life as a writer, it is, in its own way, fraught with perils; and Frank is only deceiving himself when he refuses to acknowledge the fact that he is as much a captive of events beyond his control as is his son.

For much of the novel father and son cannot seem to connect. Frank frets about “[n]ot owning the right language” to communicate with a boy who has erected his own protective barriers—his periodic barking noises and his habit of wearing headphones—against human contact. Indeed, in Independence Day, there is a great deal of emphasis upon the role that language plays in helping one to achieve or avoid connections with others. As Frank looks over the copy of his old collection of short stories, he takes some satisfaction in the knowledge that the book is “still striving to the purposes I meant it to: staging raids on the inarticulate, being an ax for the frozen sea within us, providing the satisfactions of belief in the general mess of imprecision.” As he tries to connect with Paul the next morning, Frank expresses his faith in the affirmative power of language: “My trust has always been that words can make most things better and there’s nothing that can’t be improved on. But words are required.” Of course, Frank is also experienced in using language to distance himself from others. The pride that Frank takes in his skillful use of “a form of strategizing pseudo-communication” as a realtor comes to mind, along with his attempts at “pseudo-intimacy” with Sally Caldwell. With Paul, however, Frank’s failure to find the right language is quite painful, leaving him as “lonely as a shipwreck.” At times even their “oldest-timiest, most reliable, jokey way of conducting father-son business” fails, and their “words get carried off in the breeze, with no one to care if [they] speak the intricate language of love or don’t.”

After a visit to the Basketball Hall of Fame and a night spent at the Deerslayer, father and son finally begin to make some progress toward meaningful communication; but just as the two seem on the verge of connecting, the trip ends abruptly when Paul is injured in a batting cage accident. The boy steps face-first into a fastball from a pitching machine, a device that represents the many things in life over which we have little or no control. Frank has tried to teach Paul to “let some things go” and surrender to life’s uncertainties: “you’re trying to keep too much under control, son, and it’s holding you back.” Ironically, though, Frank himself must relearn that very lesson, and it is the injured Paul who sends his father the message: “Tell my dad he tries to control too much. He worries too much too.” Indeed, although Frank has been willing to give in to uncertainty in many areas of his life, he has been as unwilling as Robard Hewes or Harry Quinn to surrender to the affection of another.

As Frank ministers to his injured son, a connection from the past steps from a crowd of onlookers to minister to Frank. It is Irv Ornstein, a step-brother whom he has not seen in twenty-five years. Interestingly, in The Sportswriter it was Irv Ornstein who, in a roundabout way, was responsible for helping Frank to connect with his relatives in Florida. Irv offers to drive Frank to the hospital as Paul is taken away in an ambulance, and Frank surrenders to Irv’s “full authority.” At the hospital where Paul’s injuries are treated, Irv and Frank become reacquainted. Irv, it seems, is “going through an ‘odd passage’ in life” which, in many ways, mirrors Frank’s own experience. A designer of flight simulators, Irv feels as if he is living a simulated existence. Like Frank, he is unable to commit to a relationship. As Frank puts it, “[Irv] complains of feeling detached from his own personal history, which has eventuated in a fear . . . that he is diminishing; and if not in an actual physical sense, then definitely in a spiritual one.” Once again we have the idea, also expressed by Harry Quinn, that the person who tries to protect himself from life’s uncertainties ends up with nothing and, in fact, runs the risk of being absorbed into nothingness. Frank, who himself has occasionally experienced a “‘fear of disappearance,’” can easily relate to such feelings; and he concludes that “Irv is entering his own Existence Period, complete with all the good and not-so-good trimmings, just as it seems I’m exiting it in a pitch-and-tumble mode.” It is, of course, possible that Frank is merely experiencing an illusion, what he himself refers to as “one of the Existence Period’s bedrock paradoxes . . . that just when you think you’re emerging, you may actually be wading further in.” Nevertheless, Paul’s accident and the chance meeting with “Irv-the-solicitous” seem to provide the impetus needed for Frank finally to exit from and advance beyond the Existence Period. As Irv says, “Incidents we can’t control make us what we are.” Or, as Frank himself says, “[T]here’s nothing like tragedy or at least a grave injury or major inconvenience to cut through red tape and bullshit and reveal anyone’s best nature.” Frank’s encounter with Irv might be compared to the reader’s encounter with Ford’s novel, for just as the feeling of solidarity with the sympathetic Irv seems to release Frank from his isolation, so the reader may be freed from his or her own isolation by the same feeling of solidarity with the author and his characters.

The novel ends on Independence Day, with Frank’s having gained independence from his self-imposed isolation and from his fear of emotional engagement. He makes progress toward improving his strained relationship with his ex-wife, Ann, and he proposes that Paul change locations and come to live with him. He even manages to find a suitable location (one of his own rental houses) for the wandering Markhams. “What more can you do for wayward strangers than to shelter them?” he says. More important, Frank reconciles with Sally Caldwell, after a long and intimate telephone conversation during which they discuss “possibilities for commitment.” He looks with hope toward the future, to a possible marriage with Sally, and to the “Permanent Period” of his life, which will surely be marked by that “greater sense of connectedness” for which he has been searching.

Frank’s reference to the “Permanent Period” echoes a passage from one of Ford’s own essays, entitled “Accommodations,” in which the author reminisces about spending a large part of his childhood in his grandfather’s hotel. “In the hotel,” writes Ford, “there was no center to things, nor was I one. . . . I simply stood alongside. . . . And what I thought about it was this: this is the actual life now, not a stopover, a diversion, or an oddment in time, but the permanent life, the one which will provide history, memory, the one I’ll be responsible for in the long run.” According to Ford, this type of marginalized life, a life without a center, taught him that “Home is finally a variable concept.” Such a life, he says, “promotes a cool two-mindedness: one is both steady and in a sea that passes with tides. Accommodation is what’s wanted, a replenished idea of permanence and transience . . .” Like Ford himself, Frank Bascombe seems to have developed a certain ambivalence, or “two-mindedness,” with respect to his feelings of marginalization. The “Residential Specialist,” whose job it is to find accommodations for others, seems to have accommodated himself to the notion that being truly at home may not be possible in a world where human beings so often feel like homeless nomads or castaways. Perhaps a clean, newly renovated “rental” is the best accommodation one could hope for in either a fluctuating realty market or a chaotic world. Indeed, the house that Frank offers to the Markhams, with its “new white metal siding and new three-way windows with plastic screens glistening dully in the sunlight,” might be compared to Hemingway’s little café, that symbol of light and order in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” While Frank may seem as resigned to his fate as any Hemingway hero, at the same time he discovers that a “homey connectedness” with others might be available even on the wildest margins, and that whatever permanence is possible in this impermanent world derives more from that sense of connectedness than from any sense of place. Frank asks: “[Is] there any cause to think a place—any place— within its plaster and joists, its trees and plantings, in its putative essence ever shelters some spirit ghost of us as proof of its significance and ours?” His answer: “No! Not one bit! Only other humans do that . . .”

The final scene of Independence Day suggests that the best way to deal with life’s marginality is to reach out to the other marginal people in the darkness. The novel’s closing calls to mind a scene toward the conclusion of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, in which Binx Boiling, when asked what he plans to do with his life, replies: “There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons.” In what is perhaps the most moving passage in Ford’s fiction, and the author’s own testament to the “efficacy of telling” (“The Three Kings”), Frank is awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of the night by a ringing telephone. Most likely it is Paul on the line, but the caller is less important than the fact that Frank responds with healing words and with what he once referred to as “the real stuff,” the “silent intimacies . . . of the fervently understood and sympathized with.” The passage clearly shows how far Frank’s journey has taken him. And for the Ford reader who may also take consolation from the healing words of a gifted writer at the height of his power, it represents a fitting culmination to everything that the author has written thus far:

And when I said hello from the darkness, there was a moment I took to be dead silence on the line, though gradually I heard a breath, then the sound of a receiver touching what must’ve been a face. There was a sigh, and the sound of someone going, “Ssss, tsss. Uh-huh, uh-huh,” followed by an even deeper and less certain “Ummm.”

And I suddenly said, because someone was there I felt I knew, “I’m glad you called.” I pressed the receiver to my ear and opened my eyes in the dark. “I just got here,” I said. “Now’s not a bad time at all. This is a full-time job. Let me hear your thinking. I’ll try to add a part to the puzzle. It can be simpler than you think.”

Whoever was there—and of course I don’t know who, really—breathed again two times, three. Then the breath grew thin and brief. I heard another sound, “Uh-huh.” Then our connection was gone, and even before I’d put down the phone I’d returned to the deepest sleep imaginable.

And I am in the crowd just as the drums are passing— always the last in line—their boom-boom-booming in my ears and all around. I see the sun above the street, breathe in the day’s rich, warm smell. Someone calls out, “Clear a path, make room, make room, please!” The trumpets go again. My heartbeat quickens. I feel the push, pull, the weave and sway of others.

In his dream, Frank is no longer alone on the periphery of life. Instead, he is a bystander among bystanders, a castaway among castaways, immersed in the great current of human experience and excited by the infinite possibilities that it offers. The dream is another sign that the Existence Period of his life has ended, and the Permanent Period has begun.

Source: Huey Guagliardo, “Marginal People in Ford’s Novels,” in Perspectives on Richard Ford, edited by Huey Guagliardo, University Press of Mississippi, 2000, pp. 21–32.