[In the following review, Johnson discusses Ford's characterization in Independence Day, and asserts that "Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape."]

When we last saw Frank Bascombe, the angst-ridden antihero of Richard Ford's highly praised 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, he was 38 and about to cast himself adrift. A journalist and onetime short-story-writer, Frank was a perfectly ordinary man with an extraordinary gift for social observation. Served up in highly original language, his perceptions lifted him above what he called "the normal applauseless life" to illuminate the "psychic detachment" caused by his divorce and by his own relentless self-doubt. At the time, The Sportswriter was an entertaining CAT scan of the shellshocked American psyche. It remains so today.

And now there's a sequel. Frank has returned, 44 years old but still unconvinced that "life's leading someplace," to narrate Mr. Ford's spirited fifth novel, Independence Day. The time is 1988, and Frank is looking forward to the Fourth of July weekend, when he's arranged to meet with his girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, and then take his 15-year-old son, Paul, to the basketball and baseball halls of fame. Paul has never recovered from the death of his brother, Ralph; occasionally barks like a dog; and has been labeled by a team of therapists as "intellectually beyond his years" yet "emotionally underdeveloped." He has recently been arrested for shoplifting "three boxes of 4X condoms ('Magnums')" and is being taken to court by the female security guard who captured him, who's accusing him of assault and battery.

Frank's little excursion with his son is, as he puts it, "a voyage meant to instruct." Somewhat unrealistically, he has sent Paul, among other things, a copy of Emerson's Self-Reliance, to help him see that the Fourth of July is "an observance of human possibility, which applies a canny pressure on each of us to contemplate what we're dependent on … and after that to consider in what ways we're independent or might be; and finally how we might decide—for the general good—not to worry about it much at all."

As in The Sportswriter, Frank appears both as a survivor of the 1960's and as a descendant of T. S. Eliot's Hollow Men; in his own words, he is a man who has "yet to learn to want properly." These things we know about Frank: he is a New Deal Democrat who believes that life's choices are limited, that getting old is humiliating and that the nearness of death is downright terrifying—though, like any decent man, he's determined not to complain too much. He has abandoned sportswriting and returned to conservative Haddam, N.J., to live in the home of his ex-wife, Ann, and work as a realtor, a profession (and point of reference) that provides as many opportunities for sardonic commentary on the human condition as his previous job did. "You don't sell a house to someone," he observes, "you sell a life." But he has also learned that "a market economy … is not even remotely premised on anybody getting what he wants."

One thing Frank wants is for Paul, a boy "you'd be sorry to encounter on a city street," to come live with him so he can straighten things out. Another thing he wants is a second chance with Ann, which seems highly unlikely since she feels that he "may be the most cynical man in the world." There's also the small matter of her remarriage, to a 61-year-old architect named Charley O'Dell. "I divorced you," Ann tells Frank, "because I didn't like you. And I didn't like you because I didn't trust you…. I wanted somebody with a true heart, that's all. That wasn't you." For Frank, a third hankering is "to form a new grip, for a longer, more serious attachment" with his girlfriend, Sally, but here too there are problems. "Life seems congested to me," she confesses. "Something's crying out to be noticed, I just don't know what it is. But it must have to do with you and I. Don't you agree?"

To be sure, Frank's relationships with women—indeed, with most people—are as puzzling to him as ever. He speaks with his best friend in Haddam, Carter Knott, for no more than 90 seconds every six months; Frank prefers to keep things this way because he has happily entered what he calls the "Existence Period," "the part that comes after the big struggle which led to the big blowup," a sort of holding pattern characterized by "the condition of honest independence."

His other problems involve trying to collect rent from Larry McLeod, a black former Green Beret, and his white wife, Betty, who live in one of two houses Frank owns in Haddam's solitary black neighborhood. Although Frank fondly remembers an affair he once had with a black realtor, whose murder remains a mystery throughout the novel, he is clearly less sympathetic to the mixed-raced McLeods, because they give off a scent of self-righteousness. To him, Betty always seems to wear "a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It's the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing. The McLeods are also, I'm afraid, the kind of family who could someday go paranoid and barricade themselves in their (my) house, issue confused manifestoes, fire shots at the police and eventually torch everything, killing all within. (This, of course, is no reason to evict them.)"

Frank is no less critical of Joe and Phyllis Markham, two "donkeyish clients" he has guided through 45 houses and is urging to close on a place located next to a minimum security prison. The Markhams watch their dreams and their marriage unravel; they come to know firsthand "the realty dreads," and after so many house showings realize they are "just like the other schmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold."

We have come to expect brilliant character sketches from Mr. Ford, and he doesn't disappoint us. In addition to the principal players orbiting like moons around Frank Bascombe's planet-sized ego, there are memorable cameo figures like his former boss, old man Schwindell, who alternates between sucking on Pall Malls and the nozzle of an oxygen tank, and Char, a saucy chef Frank meets in the Deerslayer, an inn in Cooperstown where he stumbles upon a copy of his "now-old book of short stories" and makes a discovery that leads to one of the novel's most richly ironic scenes.

But there 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. On the other hand, plot (or the notion of life's events leading much of anywhere) would violate Frank's basic belief that "you can rave, break furniture, get drunk, crack up your Nova and beat your knuckles bloody on the glass bricks of the exterior wall of whatever dismal room you're temporarily housed in, but in the end you won't have changed the basic situation and you'll still have to make the decision you didn't want to make before, and probably you'll make it in the very way you'd resented and that brought on all the raving and psychic fireworks."

Predictably, then, Frank's meeting with Sally is inconclusive. (Sally hopes someday he'll "get around to doing something memorable.") The Markhams lose the house they were looking at to a Korean family. And Frank's effort to help his troubled son veers toward tragedy and irreparable loss.

In the end, however, the small problems in the world of Frank Bascombe resolve themselves for the best—or at least in the best ways that can be expected for a man who knows that "it's not exactly as if I didn't exist, but that I don't exist as much" as other people. Despite this alienation, which Mr. Ford uses effectively for memorable comic moments, Frank has, by the novel's final scenes, managed to take his first tentative steps from the Existence Period toward a sense of community and the possibilities of the "Permanent Period," which he defines as "that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person's; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world—if it makes note at all—knows of me."

With a mastery second to none, Richard Ford has created, and continues to develop in Independence Day, a character we know as well as we know our next-door neighbors. Frank 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.