Independence Day - Hardcover

Ford, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679492658 ISBN 13: 9780679492658

Publisher: Knopf, 1995

Synopsis

Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he's still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He's still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son and visit as many sports halls of fame as they can fit into two days. Frank's Independence Day, however, turns out not as he'd planned, and this decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. Independence Day captures the mystery of life — in all its conflicted glory — with grand humour, intense compassion and transfixing power.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

Review:

Another title for Ford's 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel might be "The Return of Frank Bascombe." Bascombe, in this sequel to Ford's 10-year-old The Sportswriter, comes close to taking his place with John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom in the pantheon of confused white middle-class American literary protagonists. At age 44 he has entered what Bascombe calls "the Existence Period, the high-wire act of normalcy, the part that comes after the big struggle which led to the big blowup." Bascombe's almost comic indecisiveness has led to the breakup of his marriage, a detached, wary affair, and an achingly fragile relationship with his troubled teenage son, Paul. Ford details Bascombe's Fourth of July weekend in leisurely, measured prose, crafting scenes of muted heartbreak.

From the Back Cover:

"An extraordinary epic.... nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself." — The Times

"Frank Bascombe has earned a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape...with a wry wit and a fin de sihcle wisdom that is very much his own." — The New York Times Book Review

"Each flash of magical dialogue, every rumination a wild surprise.... Independence Day is a confirmation of a talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer." — The New York Review of Books

"A Babe Ruth of novelists.... One of the finest curators of the great American living museum." — Washington Post Book World

"One of his generation's most eloquent voices." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679492658
• ISBN 13: 9780679492658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 451