[In the following review, Kakutani praises Ford's accomplishments in Independence Day, asserting that Ford moves beyond Frank's state of mind to create a portrait of middle-class America in the 1980s.]

Perhaps the highest compliment a sportswriter can bestow on a basketball player is "he's unconscious!"—meaning, he's on one of those rhapsodic shooting streaks where instinct and reflex have combined to produce a blissful state devoid of doubt and hesitation, a state of pure immediacy where touch is everything and every shot falls with perfect, unthinking grace.

It was the fate of Frank Bascombe, the title character of Richard Ford's highly acclaimed 1986 novel, The Sportswriter, never to experience that state of grace, which is why he became a writer instead of the athlete his youthful prowess promised. Indeed, Frank emerged in that lucid novel as one of the most self-conscious, self-annotating characters to make his debut in contemporary American fiction since Binx Bolling appeared in The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy, in 1961.

Bascombe is back in Mr. Ford's powerful new novel, Independence Day, and though some seven years have passed since the death of his oldest son and the subsequent breakup of his marriage, Frank seems worse off than ever, sunk deep into a morass of spiritual lethargy. Although Frank's existential gloom and talent for self-pity can sometimes makes him an irritating (not to mention long-winded) narrator, Mr. Ford expertly opens out his story to create a portrait of middle age and middle-class life that's every bit as resonant and evocative of America in the 1980's as John Updike's last Harry Angstrom novel, Rabbit at Rest.

Since he and his wife, Ann, spilt up, we learn, Frank has suffered a kind of breakdown, quit his sportswriting job, bummed around Europe with a young woman, returned home to Haddam, N.J., and stumbled into the real-estate business. Ann, meanwhile, has remarried and moved their two remaining children, 12-year-old Clary and 15-year-old Paul, to Connecticut. All these changes have served only to magnify Frank's sense of detachment, his determination to remain cautious, careful, in control. He has entered what he calls his "Existence Period," a fancy term for going through the motions without really caring or connecting, and letting "matters go as they go."

"I try, in other words," he says, "to keep something finite and acceptably doable on my mind and not disappear. Though it's true that sometimes in the glide, when worries and contingencies are floating off, I sense I myself am afloat and cannot always touch the sides of where I am, nor know what to expect. So that to the musical question 'What's it all about, Alfie?' I'm not sure I'd know the answer."

Frank warns his girlfriend, Sally, that he may well be "beyond affection's grasp." As for his children, he says he wants to be a good father, wants to impart to them some sort of wisdom, but feels exiled from their daily lives. He is especially worried about Paul, who has been arrested for shoplifting, and who has fixated on his dog that was run over by a car almost a decade before. Paul has grown fat and slovenly, and has shaved off most of his hair; he has also taken to barking like a dog.

Frank decides that over an Independence Day weekend, he will take Paul on a father-and-son trip to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Along the way, he hopes, he will "work the miracle only a father can work."

"Which is to say," he explains, "if your son begins suddenly to fall at a headlong rate, you must through the agency of love and greater age throw him a line and haul him back."

Like The Sportswriter, Independence Day takes place over a couple of days, though Frank's ruminations move freely backward and forward in time, navigating his entire life and the lives of his neighbors and friends. His actual actions may seem banal in the extreme: he shows some houses to a disagreeable couple named the Markhams; he tries to collect rent from another troublesome couple, the McLeods; he checks in with Kari Bemish, his partner in a root-beer-stand operation; he spends an unsettling evening with Sally, and he sets off on the long drive to his ex-wife's house to pick up Paul.

On the way there, Frank comes close to witnessing a brutal murder in a motel. As in many of Mr. Ford's short stories, such acts of random violence percolate throughout this novel, grisly reminders not only of our own encroaching mortality but also of the innate precariousness of life, the fragility of the bonds of love and order and logic. Frank's co-worker Clair, a young black woman with whom he had an affair, was raped and murdered at a housing site several months before, and Frank worries, too, about the more prosaic dangers of radon, E. coli, hydrocarbons and black ice. Given such all-too-palpable perils, he reasons, why subject oneself to the further dangers of emotional hurt; better, he thinks, to avoid regret and disappointment by expecting and volunteering nothing.

If one were to describe Independence Day in outline, it might sound schematic and strained. The title and holiday backdrop baldly underscore the hero's quest for self-reliance, as does his reading of Emerson; and over the Fourth of July weekend, a traumatic event brings this man's relationship with his family into sharp and sudden focus, even as his midlife anxieties are echoed and reinforced by the problems of his friends and clients. Yet happily for the reader, the spindly armature on which Independence Day has been so methodically constructed quickly melts into the background, so persuasively does Mr. Ford conjure up the day-to-day texture of Frank Bascombe's life.

Not only does Mr. Ford do a finely nuanced job of delineating Frank's state of mind (his doubts and disillusionments, and his awareness of those doubts and disillusionments), but he also moves beyond Frank, to provide a portrait of a time and a place, of a middle-class community caught on the margins of change and reeling, like Frank, from the wages of loss and disappointment and fear. Mr. Ford uses his consummate ear for dialogue to give us a wonderfully recognizable cast of supporting characters (from the obnoxious yet oddly touching Markhams to the justifiably paranoid Bemish, from Frank's put-upon girlfriend to his troubled, troubling son), and he orchestrates Frank's emotional transactions with them to create a narrative that's as gripping as it is affecting.

With Independence Day, Mr. Ford has written a worthy sequel to The Sportswriter and galvanized his reputation as one of his generation's most eloquent voices.