Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford review – Bascombe returns

This time our loquacious hero muses on life and retirement in four slyly self-referential novellas

You will almost certainly have noticed the vogue for extremely long novels about ordinary lives, a trend whose great-grandfather could be said to be Ulysses, were it not for the fact that James Joyce’s book is written in extraordinary language, whereas Karl Ove Knausgaard, say, and Adam Mars-Jones (in his Pilcrow and Cedilla) prefer a style as low-key as everyday life.

But the immediate progenitor – along with John Updike, especially his Rabbit novels – must be Richard Ford, whose hero, Frank Bascombe, has been musing, in a genially rambling and occasionally acerbic way, on life and the things it throws at us over the course of three novels and three decades: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006). These are all big books, literally as well as figuratively, averaging well over 400 pages apiece; this latest, which has turned up on schedule, is only 240 pages, and the typeface and layout suggest the word count is actually half the amount of its predecessors. It’s also not a novel: it’s four interlinked novellas. So each one represents an eighth of a dose of Frank compared to the earlier works.

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