Be Mine

January 1, 2023

In The Wind Knows My Name, the celebrated Allende blends two bitter tales of separation: in 1938 Vienna, Samuel Adler is placed on a Kindertransport train by his mother so that he can escape the Nazis, while in 2019 Arizona, Anita D�az is pulled from her mother at the U.S. border after they have fled El Salvador for safety. In the latest from multi-award-winning Israeli author Appelfeld, Tel Aviv shopkeeper Yaakov Fine decides to travel to Poland, A Green Land, to visit his parents' ancestral village and is delighted by all he sees until he tries to purchase the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery desecrated during the Holocaust. With Be Mine, Pulitzer Prize winner Ford offers his final Frank Bascombe novel, with Frank in his twilight years facing the heart-shredding task of tending a son diagnosed with ALS (100,000-copy first printing). Following the Reese's Book Club Pick His Only Wife, Medie's Nightbloom features Selasi and Akorfa, cousins and best female friends in Ghana until Selasi becomes angry and withdrawn for reasons that take decades to emerge. In I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, her first novel in over a decade, PEN/Malamud and Rea Award winner Moore plumbs love and mortality in a tale interweaving vanished journals, a visit to a dying brother, and the questionable death of a therapy clown and an assassin. A novel-in-stories like Rachman's 500,000-copy best-selling debut, The Imperfectionists, The Impostors sets end-of-rope novelist Dora Frenhofer the task of completing her final book in pandemic lockdown, as she comes to understand her own life by contemplating her missing brother, estranged daughter, lost lover, and one enduring friend (40,000-copy first printing). In the New York Times best-selling Schulman's Lucky Dogs, two women (one a U.S. television star seeking anonymity) forge a friendship while waiting on an ice cream line in Paris, but despite a shared history of having experienced male violence, one will betray the other. From Slimani, author of the New York Times best-booked The Perfect Nanny, Watch Us Dance portrays biracial siblings in late 1960s Morocco (their father is Moroccan, their mother French) who deal differently with the era's uncertainties; tough-minded Aicha wants to study medicine in France, while her rebellious younger brother Selim would rather hang out with the hippies converging on his country.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 17, 2023
Ford finds Frank Bascombe, star of The Sportswriter, still searching for the meaning of life in his appealing latest. Frank, 74 and twice divorced, stays buoyant despite some mortal despair by indulging in clichés such as falling for a younger massage therapist. His son, Paul, has ALS, and he proposes they road-trip together to Mount Rushmore. In a rented RV, Frank and Paul set out from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where Paul has just finished participating in a clinical study. On the way through South Dakota, they stop at the famed Corn Palace, spend a night at a rundown motel, and visit a dire casino called the Fawning Buffalo. “What causes places to be awful is always of interest,” Frank notes in Rapid City. Father and son banter with mock cruelty, but Frank’s outlook is sincere: “Not every story ends happy. Out in the gloom you can find some lights on.” These pages are steeped in melancholy, and for the most part Ford’s prose stays within the speed limit, neither soaring nor stalling, though he stops the reader cold with the occasional startling insight: Paul, divulging the details of his dementia, remarks on Frank’s indomitable mind: “You connect everything.” Ford’s fans will find much to love.

June 2, 2023

Pulitzer Prize winner Ford's final Frank Bascombe novel finds Frank now 74, twice divorced and caring for his adult son Paul, diagnosed with ALS, all of which has led Frank to reevaluate his own life. Much of the novel takes place in Minnesota, where Paul is enrolled in an experimental drug study at the Mayo Clinic while Frank finds solace with a young Asian masseuse. With the study ending, Frank proposes they take a trip to Mount Rushmore, mostly as a coping strategy for both father and son and perhaps as a way for them to find a measure of peace with their situation. Leaving just before Valentine's Day, they begin an odyssey across an absurdist U.S. heartland in a rented camper too dilapidated to sleep in, arriving on a freezing Valentine's Day, where they find the expected and the quite unexpected. This is a sometimes grim and often broodingly comic meditation on aging, death, the state of the nation, and the nature of happiness in old age. VERDICT While not the best of the four Bascombe novels (e.g., Let Me Be Frank with You), it is still a worthy conclusion to a series that ranks with Updike's "Rabbit" novels for its incisive take on American life across several decades.--Lawrence Rungren

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
Frank Bascombe receives the send-off he deserves in this fifth book of the series, following Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Death is very much on the mind of the 74-year-old narrator of this curtain call of a novel. But not primarily his own. His one surviving son, Paul, has contracted ALS (or "Al's," as they personify it), and Frank is shepherding him through what both know will be his final days--first at the Mayo Clinic in wintry, frigid Rochester, Minnesota, and then on a pilgrimage to Mount Rushmore. It's a trip that both men find senseless and absurd, but you have to fill a life somehow, even if it's about to end. Paul has neither forgotten nor forgiven his parents' split, their marriage doomed after the death of his brother. Now Paul's mother (Frank's first ex-wife) is dead as well. Frank seems adrift, but then he always has. He's a reflective man but not a particularly deep thinker, more reactive to the vagaries of life than purposeful at determining any particular goal, direction, or meaning. But death--his first wife's, his son's, and eventually his own--gives him a lot to ponder about the meaning of it all, if there is any, and causes him to reflect on the life he has lived through the previous novels. One needn't have read those to appreciate this, but it could well inspire readers to revisit the entire fictional cycle, launched to great acclaim with The Sportswriter (1986). As its title alludes, the new novel focuses on Valentine's Day, as much as Independence Day (1995) did on that holiday: It's a novel about the ambiguities of love and happiness. Frank remains a funny guy, both ha-ha funny and a little odd, but Ford couldn't be more serious about his craft, his precision, his attention to detail, his need to say exactly what he means. If this is also Ford's curtain call, he has done himself proud.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
Ford introduced protagonist Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter (1986). He reappeared in Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). Here Frank is a septuagenarian, and his son, Paul, 47, is undergoing experimental therapy for ALS at the Mayo Clinic. Frank has relocated from New Jersey, renting a nearby house so he can help. Paul's days are numbered, a fate he accepts with equal parts rueful resignation and bitter black humor. Their father-son relationship is alternately antagonistic and tentatively tender. Once the therapy is complete, Frank and Paul embark on a road trip to Mount Rushmore on Valentine's Day. Ford masterfully captures the strained dynamic of two men attempting to articulate emotions. Frank has a rich interiority that he struggles to manifest externally, while Paul is a master of non sequiturs, bad puns, and pithy insults. Ford's prose attains a rare combination of exquisite beauty powered by dialogue that has the casual familiarity of a jocular Everyman gifted with a winning, sly wit. Be Mine ultimately charts the journey of the human condition and the strivings, failings, and resiliency of the human heart. A fitting finale to the landmark Bascombe saga, this ranks among Ford's best.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will pursue the conclusion to Ford's celebrated run of novels about his iconic character Frank Bascombe.

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