Here's the deal:

I read this book and its predecessor The Sportswriter, which both feature the same protagonist Frank Bascombe, back to back. Both are rather long books. In fact, any hint of an actual plot conflict that needs to be resolved is completely buried beneath an excessive amount of pointless verbiage. There is just way too much never-ending circular navel gazing, an overabundance of pointless descriptions of the weather, scenery, and minute irrelevant behaviors. And most importantly, there are endless descriptions and projections of people's thoughts and feelings. It just goes on and on and on and on.

Not much really happens in these books. All that occurs is that Frank keeps changing his mind about things both large and small. He is the personification of indecisiveness, going back and forth and back and forth, sometimes even within the same paragraph or twice on the same page.

Then again, this book won the Pulitzer prize AND the Pen/Faulkner award. So, what do I know? But I'm willing to bet that the judges didn't read these two books back to back. I really hated them and I'm SO GLAD to be done with them.

I read it! Here's why: "Nothing less than the history of the 20th century itself. A unique epic!" Doesn't such a description intrigue you? And what do you think this epic is?

The concerns of a minor diplomat in the US where an unprecedented gossip unfolds. Forgive me but I put it aside (even patience has its limits) and added it to the list of UNREADABLES.

This short text seems to express a certain dissatisfaction or disappointment with a particular work or situation. The description of it as "the history of the 20th century" and "a unique epic" initially creates anticipation, but then the author's reaction of putting it aside and labeling it as unreadable shows a contrast. It makes one wonder what exactly went wrong or what aspects of it failed to meet the author's expectations. Perhaps the "unprecedented gossip" that was unfolding was not to the author's taste or did not hold enough substance. Overall, it leaves the reader with a sense of curiosity about the nature of this work and the reasons for the author's strong reaction.

Richard Ford is always wonderful.

Reading his works allows us to understand what it truly means to have no choice but to grow.

His writing has a unique charm that draws readers in and makes them reflect on the various aspects of life.

Through his vivid descriptions and engaging stories, he shows us the challenges and joys that come with the process of growing up.

Whether it's dealing with relationships, facing responsibilities, or finding one's place in the world, Richard Ford's works offer valuable insights and perspectives.

He makes us realize that growing is not always easy, but it is an essential part of our journey.

His words have the power to inspire and move us, and they continue to touch the hearts of readers around the world.

In conclusion, Richard Ford's writing is a true gift, and we are fortunate to have the opportunity to experience it.

Frank Bascombe, more morose than his previous self in the "Sportswriter," makes a comeback as the astonishingly well-portrayed protagonist with an incredibly captivating inner voice.

He constantly struggles to form genuine connections with those around him and is always, to some extent, being insincere with his friends and family.

It is only the reader who comprehends his profound philosophies and the intricate reactions he has as events unfold in his life.

Richard Ford deserves great praise for creating a character so vivid and real that one feels as if they have acquired an intimate friend.

The depth and complexity of Frank Bascombe make him a truly remarkable and unforgettable literary creation.

His story is one that draws the reader in and keeps them engaged from beginning to end, offering a unique and thought-provoking perspective on life, love, and the human condition.

Overall, Frank Bascombe is a character that will stay with you long after you have finished reading the book.

This is the intermediate book in the Frank Bascombe trilogy.

It is perhaps the best of the three, covering the time span from Frank's divorce from Ann, which occurred 7 years earlier, all the way to the week of Independence Day.

During this period, Frank is dilly-dallying about his attachment to Sally. He also goes on a foreseeably unfortunate trip with his 15-year-old disturbed son. Additionally, he attempts to sell a house to a noxious couple.

Actually, the real estate threads of these novels are quite interesting. They add an engaging layer to the story, showing the various aspects of Frank's life and his interactions with different people in the context of property transactions.

The only caveat that I have is that while self-awareness is the hallmark of Frank Bascombe, too many of the other characters are also gifted with this trait, which seems implausible. It makes the characters feel a bit too similar in their psychological depth.

In addition, the dialogue of the characters, particularly in the case of Ann and Sally who sometimes seem indistinguishable, is too similar. This lack of distinctiveness in their speech patterns can be a bit confusing for the reader.

The use of the word "encouraging" is too frequent and distracting. It pops up so often that it draws the reader's attention away from the overall flow of the story.

Apart from that, it is still a fine read. The story has its own charm and keeps the reader engaged throughout.

In this second novel of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe quartet, I was deeply drawn into the microcosm of the man's life and lifestyle, as well as the macrocosm of America. The environment and history paralleling the structure of his life added a rich layer to the story.

Frank is in what he terms his “Existence Period,” showing personal progress from his previous “fugue state.” He remains an enigma in many aspects, with his inconsistencies still present. However, despite his flaws, I couldn't help but feel compassion and admiration for him. He glides over some flaws and makes excuses, but also faces and resolves some of his incongruence.

Frank continues to struggle, experiencing inner battles between his baser and higher selves. It's almost as if the blows of life have sent him into a second adolescence in his early 40s, making him less sure of how to find his way than decades earlier.

Adding to his challenges, he is a divorced man with two children, striving to sort himself out in a new framework. Richard Ford's skillfully molds this raw material into a fascinating character study.

In this novel, Frank's ex-wife is remarried, and his children are less accessible as the new family moves to a different state. He is no longer a sportswriter but has become a Realtor, sometimes wincing at the mispronunciation by his customers. He also owns two rental houses, in line with his new perspective of helping others find homes.

The novel takes place over one July 4th weekend, with Frank's thoughts, feelings, and attempts to piece together his life generating a long and psychologically fascinating read. An unexpected family crisis drags him back into a fugue state, highlighting why Richard Ford won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel.

I suspect this novel couldn't be fully appreciated without reading The Sportswriter first, as there is much to understand about Frank's previous life that ties directly to his current stage.

These novels, each a pinnacle slice of life in one man's quest for his human being-ness, are a mesmerizing and in-depth character study that gains breadth and depth with each successive book. I eagerly look forward to reading the third novel of this quartet in the near future.

I received this book as a birthday gift and really wondered if I would like it. I was heartened by the fact that it was a Pulitzer Prize winner, but I still wasn't sure how much I would enjoy reading about a divorced man starting a second career as a real estate agent.

However, as I delved into the pages, I was pleasantly surprised. The author's writing was incredibly captivating. The use of internal dialogue and everyday situations made each of the characters come to life. It was as if I was peeking into their private worlds.

Although I found myself never really connecting to the main character on a deep emotional level, I was still fascinated by the intimate details of his life. This, to me, is a sign of truly great writing. The author was able to draw me in and keep my attention, even when I didn't have a personal connection to the protagonist.

I'm glad I received this book as a gift and would highly recommend it to others. It's a testament to the power of good storytelling and the ability of a writer to create a world that readers can get lost in.

TUTTO POTREBBE ANDARE MOLTO PEGGIO

Frank Bascombe is no longer a sports journalist; he has become a real estate agent. The phenomenon of a protagonist reappearing in multiple stories originated first on the page rather than on the screen. And, on the other hand, the art of moving images has a much shorter history than that based on the written word. However, I believe it has been the more recent muse that has stimulated it to the current level.

The same character, whether the protagonist or not, who reappears, can have several reasons. Apart from the more 'commercial' one, the need to exploit a possible success, it could be the alter ego of its author. Or, it could also be the one that the author would like to embody, his's better soul'. Or, it is a developed point of view that is particularly suitable for telling certain stories.

For example, Richard Ford has noted how Frank Bascombe's ability to mix both the serious and the comic aspects of the things that happen to him has led him to use him more than once (Sportswriter, this Independence Day, the subsequent The Sportswriter, and finally with All That Could Go Wrong, which in the original has a much more interesting title: Let Me Be Frank with You, let me be Frank with you, which in a first edition was actually translated as Frankly, Frank).

And I feel I have to agree with him because Richard Ford had shown very little lightness and a comic side in his first attempts.

Frank has been married and is now divorced. He has two children who live with his ex-wife and her new rich husband far away from New Jersey, where Frank lives and works. All of this we already know in part if we have read The Sportswriter before: but here, in any case, the picture is completed, it gains other pieces.

Frank's relationship with his children is complex, the distance certainly doesn't help, but above all the very bad relationship with his ex-wife who doesn't want to see or hear him, while Frank would be more malleable.

The fact is that Frank is malleable towards life: in the sense that he doesn't seem to take firm positions, make choices. It would seem that his talent is to let himself live, without however letting himself go. He has a good adaptability spirit, he is provided with a very useful strong sense of irony, he prefers the role of spectator to that of actor. In this sense his new job is more useful to him than the previous one: being a real estate agent allows him to be able to wear a smiling mask every day behind which to hide and possibly be left in peace.

I would be inclined to define Frank as someone who doesn't believe that life leads anywhere.

It is 1988, it is the Independence Day weekend, an important holiday in the US. The forty-four-year-old Frank drives, thinks and tells. He has planned to spend some time with his adolescent son, who has recently had a small problem with the law. A son who tires him and whom he doesn't like very much, but whom he would still like to be able to approach.

But on the holiday weekend he also wants to spend some time with his girlfriend Sally, with whom he wants to intensify the relationship, even if at the base there is:

I love you, I told her. But I could also not have said it.

The voice of Frank is convincing, self-ironic, daily, apparently from next door: Ford constructs it without making us feel the work of construction. Which gives it a tone of immediacy that facilitates temporal and logical leaps, sudden digressions, remaining fresh, never becoming literary.

And speaking of digressions, with a taste that seems to me to be purely American, Ford manages to fill entire and long pages with detailed descriptions of the star-and-stripes real estate market, which for some readers will seem indigestible and boring, while for others they could instead be exciting.

I place myself halfway between the two positions: I enjoyed the first ones, then I started to feel them slow down.

It could be worse. It could rain.

Frank Bascombe is a truly typical American suburban psychopath.

He doesn't actively go out looking to cause harm to others, yet he does so simply because he lacks any concept of helping others or understanding that anyone else apart from himself has feelings.

Somehow, Ford has managed to craft him in such a way that, while he is by no means a likable character, he is just about tolerable, albeit barely.

The writing is truly fascinating. In the story, nothing really seems to happen in a traditional sense, and yet, you still find yourself compelled to read on.

Even when you are confronted with his admissions of having done truly terrible things, such as rape, you continue to read, perhaps just to be certain that he will ultimately end up alone.

The wisest individuals choose to avoid engaging with him because they are fully aware that he will eventually destroy everyone and everything around him.

So, on I will read (again, not entirely sure why) to the next book to witness how he manages to further mess up his life and family.

It's a strange allure that this character and the story hold, making it a captivating yet somewhat disturbing read.

I’ve nursed a theory for some time that it should be possible to define a category of ethnic literature around the WASP experience. We’ve done a great deal to theorize African-American or Jewish-American literature, and we have bestowed a significant amount of critical attention upon the Fitzgerald-John O’Hara-Updike-Carver school of authors. However, I don’t believe we’ve regarded them as an ethnic group. They’ve been the “American” school against which other, accented figures are contrasted.

In any case, I commence my theorizing with an observation from Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited,” but it could be found in numerous places in Fitzgerald’s works. The idea is that much of what concerns him is ‘dissipation,’ the phenomenon of a gifted character squandering something into nothing. O’Hara surely takes up this notion in Appointment in Samarra, and the same concept lies at the heart of the Rabbit novels. Rabbit Angstrom begins with something, a social position and the implicit promise of success, but he continuously fumbles it away. Along the way, such authors permit that experience to become intertwined with the experience of America itself, having them embody an idea of American decline, or at least – going back to Gatsby – the decline of a certain kind of middle-class, white and Protestant America. (Quick footnote: I’m aware that Fitzgerald and O’Hara were not WASPs themselves, but they both so aspired to the status that they wrote, literally, the book on how to achieve it.)

I state all of this because, if I ever decide to prove that point, I can’t conceive of a better novel to focus on than this one. It is excellently written, but I feel inclined to utter an “of course” when I say that. Ford is a master stylist, and – though I don’t hear it as frequently as I might expect – Frank Bascomb is the clear heir to Rabbit. I admire Updike as an understated stylist (and also, in his Bech books, as an over-the-top stylist), and I believe Ford can stand right beside him. If writers were law firms where talented senior partners brought in talented junior partners in their same mold, I can envision doing business with Updike and Ford, and I intend it as a compliment to both.

Instead, what I glean from this novel is less its acute exploration of mid-life self-recrimination and more the degree to which it asserts one man’s experience of life’s challenges as metonymy for a larger national reimagining. Strip away the profound literary skill in play – which is, of course, the reason to read the novel in the first place – and this is all about a man who realizes he faces a reckoning as a father and as a numbed soul as ‘independence day’ approaches. He takes his son on a road trip to the various sports halls of fame, to places against which all of us fall short, and he insists his son read Emerson along the way. It’s a mini-crisis, or an extension of the greater crisis, that young Paul can’t seem to find any use for Emerson except – right before the accident that resets the parameters of Frank’s life – to tear the pages out of the book. And it’s partial evidence of Frank’s moving past his “existence period” that he can begin to imagine Paul reading Emerson more carefully, that he can envision Paul coming into his American birthright.

Once you search for such evidence, it is abundant and generally unsubtle. Even the epilogue portion of the novel deals with the ebbing of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams’s influence, on Frank’s casual insistence that he not only hasn’t forgotten them but that he thinks of them with a kind of intensity that surprises the neighbor-friend who brings the subject up himself.

All in all, Frank is ineffectively seeking his personal independence against the backdrop of the country’s uncertain stagger in that direction as well. The novel takes place in the months before the Dukakis/George H. Bush election which, though that feels like an achingly innocent political choice, appears to Frank like a choice between a liberal figure who’s mostly surface against a generally selfish and unreflective conservatism. (Again, that makes the book seem downright naïve compared to what we witness in the current administration.) Frank retains his strength and his ideals, but he has little to which he can apply that strength and he has almost no sense of how to pursue those ideals.

I can envision a situation where someone might argue that we’ve heard enough from privileged white men who can’t figure out what to do with the good fortune of their birthright. To that, I’d respond, first, there should always be room for voices of this caliber. The context of this one has changed sufficiently that, where it might have been a contender for great American novel status 20 years ago, I think it’s probably advisable to downgrade it to really-good-American novel today. But still, this is a novel as excellent as what Updike was producing, and that’s a rare enough fruit that we must care about it if we’re going to care about literature at all.

I’d also say, though, and this brings me back to where I started, that Ford isn’t insisting that we view his story as the only American story. Everyone who undertakes what my old professor Julia Stern taught me to call auto-American-biography has the license to present him or herself as representatively American. As readers, we need to see not just the soloist but the entire choir that emerges. If we place this work alongside the other excellent works of its era – beside the best of Philip Roth or Toni Morrison – we can begin to perceive it in a light that continues to do it justice. There’s white privilege at the core of this, and there’s a thoughtful sense of diminishment (or dissipation) that, in the unthinking hands of Trumpdom, is appalling. But at bottom, this is a story of someone who desires the greatness that this country promised. If we grant him the standing to represent a larger group around him, if we allow him to stand as “ethnic” in the sense of representing a particular group experience in the coming together of America, then I believe his voice has a more distinct place.

I wouldn't say this is a book for all readers or all occasions.

However, it truly was the perfect book for a rainy Fourth of July weekend when I was confined to my home alone with my dog.

I was laid up and unable to walk after some improperly stacked firewood fell and crushed my toes.

I liked this better than The Sportswriter, although I did find some characters and conversations tiresome.

I can understand how many people might not get into this book.

But I became deeply immersed in it because it's one of those long novels where not much happens, yet it allows you to inhabit another person's life and mind completely.

So instead of lying glumly on the couch all weekend with my foot wrapped in towels and ice while America joyfully celebrated its birthday outside, I got to tour New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York State.

Rather than just being an immobilized, bored, and crabby version of myself, I got to experience what it was like to be Frank Bascombe for a change.

Not that there's anything especially wonderful about being Frank Bascombe, but sometimes it's nice to step into someone else's shoes.

In Independence Day, we pick up a bit later than we left off with Bascombe in The Sportswriter.

It's now Independence Day weekend in 1988, and Bascombe has entered what he calls his "Existence Period."

He is drifting through his forties while working as a real estate agent in his beloved Haddam, NJ.

Bascombe is a generally good-natured representative of easy American privilege: straight, white, well-off, and more or less content in his suburban idyll, despite a few setbacks.

He has a deceased child, a divorce he hasn't fully recovered from, and a brutally murdered ex-girlfriend.

But he is existing quite nicely and doing mostly fine.

However, there is no real "but" here.

This isn't a novel about conflict or rupture or unexpected twists.

For me, it was simply about living inside someone else as he has a more interesting weekend than the one I had planned for myself.

Instead of icing his purple toes and limping pitifully around the dog park, Bascombe has to show a house to a difficult couple of clients, run some errands in Haddam, visit his girlfriend on the Jersey Shore, and take his troubled adolescent son on a bonding trip to the basketball and baseball halls of fame.

The majority of the book is Bascombe driving around the Northeast in his Crown Vic and having conversations with various characters, with whom he generally tries to have meaningful human connections, with varying degrees of success.

It's clear to me that I would have hated this book at most earlier stages of my life.

I wouldn't have even considered reading it because it's about a divorced realtor living in suburban New Jersey, and that's not the kind of novel I used to be interested in.

There are no tricks here: if that brief description sounds unappealing to you, you probably shouldn't read Independence Day.

This was one of those novels that made me realize I've officially become a boring grownup with an interest in and empathy for boring grownup concerns.

There were pages in here that were the main character's thoughts about real estate, and I found them fascinating.

The same goes for his thoughts on parenting, aging, mortality, and divorce.

This book is not for the lively or young at heart, and my enjoyment of it marks some unnamed midlife stage of my own.

Without overly concerning myself with irresponsible gender essentialism, I'll say that this book's portrayal of masculinity and being male was really interesting to me.

Bascombe reminds me in certain ways of my father (who's from New Jersey) and my husband (who loves sports), and there was a lot about his character that seemed to represent and partly explain some of what I find opaque and mysterious about many men.

So I did get a kick out of that.

I also loved all the landscapes and descriptions of place.

I can't remember the last book I read that so vividly transported me to places I almost knew but didn't.

I'm quite familiar with that part of the country, but I haven't been to Cooperstown (really hope to go someday) or to Haddam (which doesn't exist), though now I definitely feel that I've seen them and the other places in the book as well.

And I greatly appreciated that on this homebound July Fourth weekend, which otherwise could have been an even more depressing waste, this book provided an escape.

Glutten for punishment that I am,

after reading (and strongly disliking!) Ford's first Bascombe novel, I soldiered on with the hope that "Independence Day" was, indeed, worthy of the Pulitzer Prize.

After just a few chapters, I realized that Ford had a formula.

There were several chapters of Bascombe's narcissistic ramblings, coupled with (surprise!) a life-changing event that shocks Bascombe into engaging with his family and the world around him about 60 pages from the end.

I'm not on the Pulitzer panel, but in my opinion, they made a huge mistake by awarding this hack this highly-coveted prize.

The story seemed predictable and lacking in true depth.

Bascombe's character was unlikable and his ramblings were tiresome.

The supposed life-changing event felt forced and didn't really have the impact it was meant to have.

Overall, I was extremely disappointed with "Independence Day" and couldn't understand why it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

It just goes to show that sometimes, the judges may not always make the right decisions.