Middle Aged Angst

No, I’m not writing about my middle aged angst, though I guess I could be.  A couple of months ago, I decided to read Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, partly because the book, in its slick Vintage cover, had been teasing me for years, and partly because I had heard some good things about The Lay of the Land, Ford’s latest novel, and the third in the Bascombe trilogy.  This past week I finished the middle book, Ford’s Pulitzer-winner, Independence Day.  I have strangely mixed feelings about these books; strange because I do not feel conflicting “I loved it and I hated it” feelings but because I liked the books but feel…strange…about them.  I cannot really put my finger on exactly why I am conflicted.

Like many readers, I have my touchstone books and authors, and John Updike is one of those for me.  In many ways, Ford’s books reminded me of Updike, and his protagonist and narrator, Frank Bascombe, is similar to Rabbit Angstrom, Updike’s tetralogy’s protagonist. In the first book, Bascome is–you guessed it–a sportswriter, recently divorced, still mourning both his divorce and the death of his son several years earlier.  Independence Day picks up about five or six years later, as Frank has dropped sportswriting in favor of–scratch that; he never does anything “in favor of”–to sell real estate.  The pattern here is similar to Updike: novels spaced a few years apart, contemporary settings, middle-class existence, the implied search for meaning.

Not a whole lot happens.  But that’s not quite true.  A lot happens, but everything that happens is life.  Bascombe has planned a trip with his son, who lives with Frank’s ex, Frank’s daughter, and the ex’s new husband in a rich town in Connecticut.  He has mapped out a 48 hour whirlwind visit to the Basketball Hall in Massachusetts and the Baseball Hall of Fame in New York, where he hopes that he can reconnect with his son, who is stuck in some fairly typical adolescent turmoil–shoplifting, surliness, violent outbursts.  While he is preparing to leave on the trip, Bascombe also has to deal with a couple who have been searching for a house for several months but who have rejected everything that he shows them in their price range; the clients are growing more and more irritable and annoying, and Bascombe is growing more and more impatient with them.  Much of the book’s action consists of long dialogues, frequently on the telephone, about the minutiae of living–circular discussions with his girlfriend, not-quite-fights with his ex, wearing-thin sales pitches to the clients, hollow bantering with his employee.  Events unfold slowly, at the same trivial pace of life, until big events sneak up.  So craftily do these events sneak that they hardly seem like events as they get washed away by the tidal wave of unending minutes of our lives.

Bascombe himself is a bit of an enigma.  In reading the two books, I never felt like I could find a fold or angle by which I could grab ahold of him.  He speaks about himself a lot, but there is the sense that he speaks only about the surfaces that he presents to the world and that he is holding back something vital even when he reveals his emotion.  We know, for example, that he is still in love with his ex, but he is so reserved about that that we only pick up on the fact through slow hints.  At one point, his ex says to him, “Everything’s in quotes with you, Frank.  Nothing’s really solid.  Every time I talk to you I feel like everything’s being written by you.  Even my lines.  That’s awful.  Isn’t it?  Or sad?”  Ann is, I think, half right.  Frank wants things to be written a certain way, and he tries desperately to make things come out, but he fails.  His life is in quotes–he is a middle-aged divorced man who fears becoming the stereotypical caricature of a middle-aged divorced man, which is also a stereotypical thing.  The biggest cliche of modern life is to fear becoming a cliche, isn’t it?

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