Review: Michiko Kakutani, NY Times
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.
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 Sportwriter," 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 make 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, split 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."
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