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9 May
3:51pm, 9 May 2024
22,499 posts
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Columba
I think this is a very good book. I don't want to re-read it, I don't want to read any of the other books in the series, and I'm glad I don't live in the USA.
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11 May
2:05pm, 11 May 2024
8,800 posts
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westmoors
Wow that was a slog. I just couldn't get into it. I had no interest in the characters or the subject (or lack of).
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8 Jun
5:50pm, 8 Jun 2024
68,380 posts
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LindsD
I totally loved this. Couldn't wait to get time to pick it up. Despite being worried about all the description, I found that it just added to the whole atmosphere of the book. I really want to read the others now. I loved the way that Ford made it so easy to be in Frank's head, but also showed us how flawed he was, at the same time as not making us hate him. Some of the musings about being a parent really chimed with me, too. Also being a part-time parent.
I think, perhaps, that, as McG said about Storied Life, this was absolutely the right book at the right time for me. Just challenging enough but not too challenging, just tragic enough but not too tragic.
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8 Jun
5:52pm, 8 Jun 2024
68,381 posts
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LindsD
And I gave it a 9.
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8 Jun
6:46pm, 8 Jun 2024
86,388 posts
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Diogenes
I’m really pleased you enjoyed it so much, Linds.
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8 Jun
8:16pm, 8 Jun 2024
68,382 posts
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LindsD
 I really did.
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13 Jul
10:15am, 13 Jul 2024
21,925 posts
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Chrisull
I have just finished the fifth book in the series "Be Mine", it reinforces (to my mind) what we said earlier about American regionalism and Ford very much being a leading exponent of it. It concerns Frank Bascombe taking his terminally ill son Paul to see the presidents carved into Mount Rushmore. Ford writes wonderfully about places and non-places, car lots, rotting motels, massage parlours giving them life, people and stories, without patronising or stereotyping. The road trip, or just the preparations for it, take up most of the book.
Be Mine brings to life his somewhat gnomic son Paul, in a way that he hadn't previously - where the baseball pitch that caused the loss of an eye, where Paul stood not swinging , letting it happen, at the Independence day gave us a kind of isolating distance from the character. Paul is as difficult and prickly as ever, but we gain insight into him, the exchanges between Paul and Frank (or Lawrence) as Paul dubs him, where they riff off various aspects of American life, are funny, wry, sad and hold the greatest pleasures of this. I feared the ending of the book given the finite and prescient nature of the "plot", but I need not, it is weirdly uplifting, moving and you feel changed for having read it.
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13 Jul
10:33am, 13 Jul 2024
86,946 posts
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Diogenes
That’s interesting. I think I’m going to have to go back to Frank (to mix up a couple of Amy Winehouse songs)
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