characters, Lamb comes the closest to the cantankerous and colorful southerners of Faulkner, and his death may mark the passing of the southern individualist. Newel lies to Mrs. Lamb about Lamb’s last words, apparently too embarrassed to repeat their absurd banality.

The novel begins and ends with the image of the retarded boy on the riverbank with a gun in his hand. If this image summarizes Ford’s view of the South, the other image patterns of the novel reflect the contingency of American life as a whole. Beebe Henley’s job moves her to different corners of the globe almost every day. Newel’s luggage disappears. When Hewes and Newel cross the river to the island, Newel sees a deer, swimming across the river, suddenly pulled under the water by a powerful force, never to rise again. Nothing is permanent or reliable; Ford’s characters fight their personal battles on uncharted land surrounded by the constant flow of the river that most signifies the South but that also, in its power and treachery, represents the larger America.

The Ultimate Good Luck

Contingency and displacement become synonymous with violence and deceit in Ford’s next novel. In The Ultimate Good Luck, Harry Quinn, an alienated Vietnam War veteran, is asked by his former lover Rae to help free her brother, Sonny, from a jail in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he is serving a sentence for drug smuggling. Quinn makes arrangements to free Sonny through bribery with the help of a local lawyer, Bernhardt, but matters become complicated. Sonny’s superiors believe that Sonny stole some of the drugs he was carrying and hid them before he was arrested. Oaxaca itself is under terrorist siege and is filled with police. Bernhardt’s allegiance and motives are inscrutable. Quinn is terrorized by Deats, an “enforcer” working for Sonny’s superiors. Unsuspected layers of power unfold, often in conjunction with arbitrary violence.

Indeed, the novel is dominated by images of violence and chance. The contingency that dominates A Piece of My Heart here is marked for higher stakes. With a flat, tough prose reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett’s, Ford presents a film noir world of threat and hidden danger. The novel opens with a scene of violence and casual sexuality: Quinn meets an Italian tourist and takes her to a Mexican boxing match that is especially vicious. This casual encounter is indicative of Quinn’s life; in flashback the reader discovers that Quinn first met Rae, by chance, at a dog-racing track; he has pursued jobs, such as game warden, that have brought him close to violence. As the novel unfolds, these chance encounters and acts of violence become less controllable. Quinn sees three American girls vanish during their vacation. He and Rae see a family of tourists killed by a terrorist bomb as they stand in front of an ice-cream store; Sonny is attacked and mutilated in jail; Deats binds Quinn and threatens him with a scorpion. Even Quinn’s own body, hardened by war and decorated with tattoos, betrays him with a fit of dysentery. Oaxaca becomes a nightmare landscape of violence and confusion, reminiscent of Quinn’s Vietnam experience. Like the island of A Piece of My Heart, Oaxaca becomes a crucible of the forces that drive the characters, a metaphoric landscape of their souls.

The plot is resolved by death. Sonny is killed in jail, Bernhardt is gunned down, and Quinn ends his search in a shoot-out with strangers. Although Quinn takes some pride in his accomplishment, his survival is simply the ultimate good luck, another chance outcome in a series of gambles.

The Sportswriter

Of Ford’s novels, The Sportswriter has been the best received, though it may be his least typical. Told in the first person by Frank Bascombe, a thirty-eight-year-old short-story writer turned sportswriter, the novel details Bascombe’s adventures over an Easter weekend, beginning with an annual pilgrimage with his former wife (referred to only as X) to the grave of his first son, who died at age eight of Reye’s syndrome. It was that death that led to Bascombe’s divorce and what he calls his period of “dreaminess,” actually a form of detachment or emotional numbness. Over the course of the Easter weekend, Bascombe flies with his lover, Vicki Arcenault, to Detroit, where he interviews a paraplegic former football hero, Herb Wallagher. Cutting the trip short, they return home to Haddam, New Jersey. Bascombe visits the home of Vicki’s parents on Easter Sunday, but the visit is interrupted by a call from X: Walter Luckett, a member of the Divorced Men’s Club, a casual society to which Bascombe belongs, has committed suicide. Before returning to Haddam, Bascombe fights with Vicki. Bascombe eventually takes a late train into Manhattan to visit his office, something he does not normally do. There a chance encounter with a new female writer sparks what will become an affair. In the novel’s epilogue, Bascombe is in Florida, waiting for a young Dartmouth woman to visit. He seems to have stopped grieving for his son, and he may be on the verge of writing fiction once more.

Detached, ironic, and cerebral, Bascombe looks for solace in the mundane and regular: He keeps up the appearances, if not the reality, of a suburban husband and father; he revels in the petty regularities of Haddam; he studies the regularized and “safe” world of professional sports. At these pursuits he is successful, but his adherence to routine and detail itself becomes part of his dreaminess, his detachment. Unable, or unwilling, to extend himself emotionally, he remains aloof from Walter Luckett’s grief over a brief homosexual affair, he turns away from the vision of a crippled former athlete he had interviewed, and he ultimately quarrels and breaks with Vicki. His failure to continue writing fiction is an analogue of his inability to connect emotionally, but the novel itself, this fictional memoir, may be his way into a better life.

Wildlife

Wildlife is told as a memoir. Set in 1960, when Joe, the narrator, is sixteen years old (Ford’s own age in 1960), the novel details the breakdown of the marriage of Jerry and Jeanette, Joe’s parents. The family had recently moved to Grand Falls, Montana, where Jerry works as a golf professional. When he is fired because of a misunderstanding, Jerry signs on to fight the forest fires that rage in the hills outside the town. That sudden decision sends Jeanette into a short affair with a well-to-do local man named Warren Miller. The bulk of the novel is a re-creation of the events of those three days, told with stark simplicity. Joe, like the child protagonists of Ford’s short stories, seems caught in the emotional detachment that was precipitated by the marriage breakdown and forced to re-create the situation with the dispassion that has marked his subsequent life. The result is a hesitant accumulation of detail and dialogue, as the retelling of the events becomes a cathartic event for Joe.

The novel is dominated by the image of fire. There are the fires that burn in the foothills and that capture the father’s imagination. It seems they cannot be extinguished; they burn through the winter, ignoring the natural seasons, and they come to stand for the unpredictable and confusing in human experience. When Jerry leaves to fight these fires, he sets off a metaphorical fire in his wife, a yearning for passion and completeness that she attempts, unsuccessfully, to fulfill with an affair. When Jerry returns and discovers the adultery, he drives to Warren Miller’s house and attempts to burn it down with a bottle of gasoline. That fire, like his wife’s adultery, burns itself out and leaves behind recriminations and guilt. Ultimately ineffective, both of these fires succeed only in scarring the psychic landscape of the characters who set them.

The most starkly realistic of Ford’s novels, and the closest to minimalist in its style, this novel received mixed reviews when it appeared. Some critics have found in the simplicity of its prose a poetic intensity (particularly in the descriptions of the forest fire and Jerry’s attempt to burn down the house); others have argued that the stark dialogue threatens to push the novel into banality. In tone and style, Wildlife is certainly more reminiscent of Ford’s short stories than of his previous novels.

Independence Day

Independence Day continues the story of Frank Bascombe that Ford began in The Sportswriter. Seven years have passed, and Bascombe has turned from sportswriter to real estate agent in Haddam, New Jersey. Set over a few days in the summer of 1988, Independence Day revolves around a climactic Fourth of July weekend in which Bascombe attempts to reconnect with his troubled son. The narrative timeline of the novel is not limited to that weekend; it meanders through the time that Bascombe takes preparing for the holiday and includes Bascombe’s meditations about the circumstances of his current troubles: his continuing affection for his ex-wife; his relationships with his girlfriends, his troubled children, and his real estate clients; his continued grief over the death of his son Ralph.

The most compelling relationships in the book are between Bascombe and his children. Bascombe wants to be a good father, but because of his divorce from his children’s mother, he feels exiled from their daily lives. He is especially worried about Paul, who has been arrested for shoplifting condoms. Paul has grown fat and slovenly, has shaved off most of his hair, and, because he has fixated on his pet dog run over by a car almost a decade before, has taken to barking like a Pomeranian. Bascombe attempts to bring himself closer to his son by taking him to the Baseball Hall of Fame for the Fourth of July weekend. The trip is a disaster. Instead of offering reconciliation, the trip confirms Bascombe’s fears that his son is emotionally disturbed, that he will possibly always be that way, and that Bascombe will have to accept this.

Bascombe begins the novel by claiming that he is in an “existence period” of his life, which he describes as a period that can mysteriously go along the way it is for a long time. However, in a time of falling property values and unease in the suburbs, he is overcome by an anxious malaise. Haddam, New Jersey, is an upper-middle-class place where little happens, but its solitude is precisely the danger to Bascombe. Left alone with his thoughts, his worry and concern force him to look with a great deal of introspection at every aspect of his world. Unable to commit to his present girlfriend, he does not commit to anything except his desire to return to the past, even as he sadly realizes that there are things in his life that he cannot fix later.

Bascombe is living in a state where past and present coexist, where memory becomes his experience, recounted with almost dreamlike qualities. He begins to feel that all the determinative things in his life have already taken place, and that now he must deal with the consequences; he cannot change his basic situation, and he wonders if the good times have come and gone. This anxiety is reinforced by his experience with clients who must let go of their dream house and opt to rent, not buy. This subplot parallels Frank’s sense that he too must face facts, and that too much water has passed under the bridge for things to be other than they are. Frank and his clients both indicate that underneath the seemingly secure surface of suburbia are distressing emotions connected to a considerable lowering of expectations. While fearing that he is disappearing into the routines of a very ordinary life, however, Bascombe does actually search for a way to interact emotionally with the world and people around him, and he comes to realize that he is more a part of things than he had thought. Finally, in addition to working out his relationships with his family, his clients, and other people around him, Bascombe also believes in the value of his attempt to construct a philosophy that might guide him through his troubling life.

The Lay of the Land

The Lay of the Land brings back Frank Bascombe for Ford’s third, final, and longest novel about his American Everyman. It is now the year 2000, and although he still sells real estate, Bascombe has moved to the Jersey Shore. In addition, he feels he has moved from his earlier “existence” period to a “Permanent Period,” in which no further major changes will be in the offing. Despite this assumption, however, major changes are taking place: Bascombe has prostate cancer; his second wife, Sally, has left him for a first husband once thought dead; his lesbian daughter is now reconsidering heterosexuality; his ex-wife Ann appears interested in a reconciliation. Other characters from the earlier books also appear, bringing with them a sense not of conclusion but of continuance. By the end of this novel, in fact, Bascombe has traded his Permanent Period for what he refers to as the “Next Level” of his life, one in which all things can be changed.

By novel’s end, Bascombe has finally reconciled himself to the death of his young son Ralph, has reconciled with Sally and his increasingly less troubled and rather canny son Paul, and has rescued his daughter from the depredations of an unscrupulous heterosexual, all in time for a big Thanksgiving reunion. It is an offbeat Thanksgiving, however, as it brings with it a life-threatening bullet to Bascombe’s heart, the result of his having interfered with the robbery of the greedy, materialistic couple next door. This violent episode takes the reader back to the novel’s opening anecdote about a woman who is the victim of a random shooter: Before she is to die, the shooter asks her if she is ready to meet her maker, a question to which she replies in the affirmative. We come to understand that this is also the question Bascombe has been asking himself.

Despite the many episodes, anecdotes, observations, and comic riffs that run through this novel’s interior monologue in a loose and seemingly desultory way, the deep subject of this novel is whether Bascombe’s life has any integrity. That Bascombe is concerned with these issues has been suggested earlier by his periodic references to the Dalai Lama and by his acquisition of a new business partner, a Tibetan Buddhist named Lobsang Dhargey. While Dhargey has morphed into a perky capitalist now named Mike Mahony, Bascombe has become more spiritual, suggesting that all his comings-and-goings have been in essence a quest for a Dalai Lama-style open heart and for a life he can justify. Bascombe recovers from his shot to the heart, and, as he descends in an airplane with Sally on his way to begin cancer treatments at the Mayo Clinic, the reader understands that although there will be no more Bascombe stories, Bascombe himself will go on to the next thing in pretty good emotional and spiritual shape. In possession of some real thanksgiving, Bascombe is, in this final installment of his saga, indeed ready to meet his maker.