New York, NY: Grove (2009)

As new in paperback.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford returns to the celebrated fictional landscape that sealed his reputation as an American master: the world of Frank Bascombe

“An estimable book—wise, funny and superbly attentive to the world.” —Time magazine

“Ford at his very best: a masterful observer of the quiet, quotidian world. . . . A book that brings us, squarely and with great compassion, into the deep end of life.” —Boston Globe

Now sixty-eight, and again ensconced in the well-defended New Jersey suburb of Haddam, Frank Bascombe has thrived—seemingly if not utterly—in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation. The desolation of Sandy is the perfect backdrop and touchstone for Ford—and Bascombe.

With a flawless comedic sensibility and unblinking intelligence, the four interlinked stories in Let Me Be Frank range over the full complement of American subjects: aging, race, loss, faith, marriage, redemption, the real-estate crash—the tumult of the world we live in. Through Bascombe—wry, profane, touching, wise, and often inappropriate—we engage in the aspirations and sorrows, longings, achievements, and failings of American life in the morning of the new century.

“The fiction of Richard Ford is the fiction of American possibility, not of material comforts but of truths gleaned from a vast nation of inscrutable convictions and competing complexities. . . . The heart of the genius—the American genius—of Frank Bascombe [is that] Ford could have suffocated him with the strictures of a quotidian existence. . . . Instead the ordinary is an aperture into the extraordinary.” —Newsweek