As in “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” the weird (and often the comical) invades the ordinary as Bascombe navigates what he calls the Permanent Period, meaning, more or less, the time of life when he believes things have settled in and the possibility of life-shattering blows has passed. He’s wrong, of course.
Ford’s pitch-perfect voice takes us as close as we can get to experiencing another person’s inner life. “It’s why I hate men my age,” Frank says to himself during an awkward but very funny funeral scene. “We all emanate a sense of youth lost and tragedy-on-the-horizon. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for our every little setback.” Those setbacks come both small and large, not the least being prostate cancer, which Frank is treating with “hot BBs in [the] gearbox.” As his totally nonnuclear family converges on Sea-Clift, Bascombe goes about his business as best he can.
Ford, himself 62 and now living on the Maine coastline, says this is the last Bascombe book. It is hard to imagine how much more Frank could tell us. As it is, when the novel nears its end, Ford seems in a bit of a hurry to wrap things up. Characters recently introduced disappear. And a plot-twist-too-far verges on parody. These are small flaws in such a large canvas, colored over 20 years. Ford has said goodbye to Bascombe before, only to find he couldn’t get the character out of his head. Nor can many readers.
