[In the following review, Bonner praises Ford as a storyteller and calls Ford's Independence Day "a work at the edge of philosophy but far enough away that its art still lives."]

"I was trying to address the country in as large a way as I can imagine—intellectually as well as spiritually. It was the way I defined myself a challenge," observed Richard Ford about his novel Independence Day during a New Orleans Times-Picayune interview. The mission suggested in his comments gives his fiction a life beyond the story and makes his narrative part of a tradition of consciously merging stories with ideas.

American literature through the late 19th century, as represented by Hawthorne and Melville, for example, repeatedly gives us writers engaged with balancing these elements. The works of Emerson, too, remind us that the American reading public once had a taste for the direct exploration of ideas in essays. Emerson's words and ideas emerge often in Independence Day as do those of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Independence Day begins with Bascombe closing up the details on a private rental, trying to close a company sale on a home, seeing his current romantic interest, preparing to pick up his troubled son from his former and now remarried wife and celebrating the nation's birthday with his son by visiting nearby basketball and baseball halls of fame. The holiday weekend has almost as much thinking as driving. Ford persistently reminds us that we are going somewhere and seeing something on this holiday journey.

Consciously political, the narrative reflects the disappointment, strained hope and confusion of life in the late 1980's. Ford sets the novel during the summer before the Democratic National Convention that nominated Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts. The author explains, "I came to sense how badly misled Americans had been by Ronald Reagan and that the choices in the election of 1988 were not a good set of choices." Contributing to this atmosphere is Haddam, N.J., a place remarkably like Princeton with its university the site of an early congress, its seminary a powerful presence and its affluent residences a contrast with its poor and minority neighborhoods.

Bascombe may work as a character who represents Ford's ideas and experiences, but he is not an Everyman. The cosmic and conscious first person ("I myself, Frank Bascombe") brings us into this story, this vision of American life that seeks an ideal amid the flora and fauna of self-interest and materialism. The poet Whitman is successful in creating an epic voice in "Song of Myself" because he emphasizes the vision itself in its varied and organic parts. Bascombe is too much an individual whose particulars and accidentals obscure the universals. In creating Bascombe, Ford reaches into the epic tendency in American culture to make a statement about this vast and challenging land. The details of Bascombe's life come in vivid and unrelenting force, allowing readers to see only parts of themselves in the character, but not enough to cause them to identify with Bascombe.

The story in its meandering is simple. In space, we go a short distance; in time, a long weekend. For a lengthy novel we encounter a limited number of characters. The situation is conventional for contemporary American life: a divorced parent exercising visitation rights with a child. The complications emerge from the protagonist's past as it affects the present, especially in the father-son relationship. Ford tells a good story (he is an especially accomplished writer of short fiction), but the landscape of the narrative provides the garden for his and Bascombe's generally liberal and often "politically correct" thinking. Events nearly always lead us into an exploration of larger and less concrete realities.

Readers of Walker Percy's novels will find here a familiar tension between narrative and idea. Independence Day, its title pregnant with meaning, suggests a summer novel, but it is fictional inquiry into things that matter, a work at the edge of philosophy but far enough away that its art still lives.