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Sunday Read: Two Excerpts from Richard Ford’s Latest Novel Let Me Be Frank With You

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Richard Ford

This Sunday we delve into the inspiration behind Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You – published this month, just in time for Christmas – and share two excerpts.

Let Me Be Frank With You, a collection of four interconnected novellas that runs to almost 500 pages, sees the return of Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) – the first book to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award – and 2006′s The Lay of the Land.

In a piece on his latest work for the Financial Times, Ford recalls the surprise and dismay he felt when he saw Bascombe returning in Independence Day, saying he did not consider himself capable of writing “connected novels”: “I wasn’t ambitious or skilful enough.”

He also reveals how finishing each of the books made him progressively more “physically ill”, saying that by The Lay of the Land: “this experience of physical and psychic infirmity which recurred worse each time through the completion of three long novels over three long decades became my ‘signal’ that I was finished with Frank. Forever. I could write different books. I already had.”

After the third book in his Bascombe trilogy, Ford insisted publicly that he was done with the character. But in 2012, after observing the “utter despair and destruction” of Hurricane Sandy, he began jotting down sentences in his notebook. “I thought, ‘Oh, Christ, these are Frank Bascombe lines,’” he says in a Wall Street Journal interview.

Bascombe is 68 – Ford himself being 70 – but the author is unwilling to call this book the last Bascombe novel. “I guess you can’t say that again,” he tells the Wall Street Journal. “You can only say that once, and I said it, and it wasn’t true.”

Read two excerpts from Let Me Be Frank With You:

Strange fragrances ride the twitchy, wintry air at The Shore this morning, two weeks before Christmas. Flowery wreaths on an ominous sea stir expectancy in the unwary.

It is, of course, the bouquet of large-scale home repair and re-hab. Fresh-cut lumber, clean, white PVC, the lye-sniff of Sakrete, stinging sealants, sweet tar paper, and denatured spirits. The starchy zest of Tyvek mingled with the ocean’s sulfurous weft and Barnegat Bay’s landward stink. It is the air of full-on disaster. To my nose—once practiced in these things—nothing smells of ruin as fragrantly as the first attempts at rescue.

“If one of these speculators suffered what I’ve suffered here, you know what would happen to him?” Arnie’s turned and started back down the berm, his loafers taking on sand. He’s stared at his ruin for long enough. He doesn’t really want my advice.

“He’d get richer, Arn,” I say.

Book details

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