Independence Day is essentially an internal monologue, set on the long July 4th weekend of 1988. It is a sequel to Ford's earlier novel The Sportswriter, which I have yet to read, but I never got the impression I was missing anything due to lack of familiarity with the earlier novel. The protagonist is Frank Bascombe, a divorced, well-educated former sportswriter who now makes his living selling real estate in the affluent New Jersey town of Haddam, while supplementing his earnings with a couple of rental properties he owns in the town's African American neighborhood.

Bascombe is at something of a mid-life crisis. We learn that he has lost a son, and while he has been divorced from his wife for years, he still has feelings for her and secretly hopes for a reconciliation. At the same time, he is seen carrying on a half-hearted affair with a presumed widow whose husband left years earlier and never came back. Bascombe has planned to spend the long weekend with his troubled teenage son Paul, who is apparently battling some sort of mental illness or depression; for some unknown reason Bascombe decides to pick up his son in Connecticut, and drive to the basketball and baseball halls of fame in Springfield, Mass. and Cooperstown, N.Y.

Although quite a bit happens over the course of the three days, the novel is not necessarily plot-driven, and after you finish reading it (or better yet listening) you don't remember what happened nearly as much as you remember the characters themselves. In that respect it reminded me a little of a book like Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool, which I loved, although I now remember few details of the story. Frank's uneasy alliance with Paul, his guilt over taking him and not his sister away for the weekend, and his struggles to maintain his sanity over a long, stressful weekend were classic and very richly drawn by Ford. We learn Frank's thoughts at every turn, whenever he confronts another character, and at times the thoughts are brilliant, sad, funny or all of the above. For example, while trying to give his disinterested son a civics lesson on the meaning of Independence Day, Paul feigns confusion and asks a question or two, which the narrator Frank knows were really meant to mock him. Paul delights at ridiculing the hall of fame during the trip, while narrator Frank tries to keep up appearances and generate enthusiasm for displays like "Bob Lanier's shoes" while leafing through the color brochures.

There is an undercurrent of sadness and tragedy in the book, including Frank's own lost child and divorce, the earlier murder of another realtor at Bascombe's office, and even the death years earlier of a family pet in an accident, which still troubles Paul. However the novel has an upbeat tone about it, as if Frank has benefitted from therapy and is destined to look on the bright side even as other characters accuse him of being hard and uncaring. There is also plenty of humor in the book, made all the funnier by narrator Poe's excellent renditions of the character voices. Frank tries desperately to sell a house to a picky Vermont couple, and his partner in a strange "birch beer" and hot dog stand remains vigilant with his shotgun, ready to blast some suspicious Mexicans who he believes want to rob him.

All in all, the book has a voice which I found refreshing and amazingly true-to-life, with observations and asides that often had me laughing out loud or shaking my head at their poignant truth. I don't know from experience what thoughts abound in the head of a middle aged, divorced father who is estranged from his kids and who desperately wants to connect with them before it is too late, but I suspect Ford, in writing this book, got them exactly right. I recommend it highly, especially the audio version narrated by Richard Poe.


American Classic   July 4, 2000
 30 out of 41 found this review helpful

Richard Ford has created in Frank Bascome the most interesting, insightful & thought provoking character in American literature since Holden Caufield. Over the course of a Fourth of July weekend, Mr. Ford takes us on a journey that moves from the current day to flashbacks in the life of Frank Bascome. He is a real estate agent in a southern New Jersey town and one of his current clients is a couple who are looking for the ideal home. When Frank thinks he has found the right home, they have reservations. Frank never seems to be able to meet the couple's pie-in-the-sky expectations and that is central theme to the book. No matter how hard we try, we never seem to meet of own expectations in life. Frank has had a failed marriage, a failed career as a sportswriter and has entered what he calls an "existance period" in his life. He yearns for the days gone by when as he says "pride still mattered". Mr. Ford's perspectives on life in general are razor sharp and he balances the deepness of the story with the right amount of humor so the book doesn't become too heavy-handed. I recommend this book as highly as any book out there. If you liked "Catcher In The Rye", check this one out. You will not be disappointed.


A struggle to read!   July 24, 2000
 19 out of 31 found this review helpful

I have no doubt that Richard Ford is a writer of talent, indeed the skill of the storyteller emerges at intervals throughout this novel, but that was not enough to either engage me as a reader or ultimately to convince me to like the book, it's characters or it's plot. Independence Day won the 1995 Pultizer Prize for fiction and although most of the reviews listed on Amazon would suggest that the award is justified, I do struggle to agree with that analysis.

The plot, although I would contest that definition, is contained within three days of the life of Frank Bascombe, a forty something, divorced real estate agent as he attempts to take his son on a holiday. To fill in some of the spaces Ford gives us a great many philosophical ramblings. Herein lies my problem with Independence Day. I have no objection to philosophy, indeed I was confused by it on a regular basis while at University. However, my main motivation for reading a novel, any novel is to be entertained. That can be through sheer enjoyment, through struggling with the challenge of the ideas (including philosophical ideas) through humour, through frustration and anger and so on. Independence Day provided no trigger at all to stimulate an emotion on any level barring that of boredom.

Consequently the book for me, and I'm aware that here I am in the minority, is contrived, repetitive, at times shallow with the pretence of a deep and meaningful statement. I was unable to invest in any of the characters and thus did not care what happened to them during the course of the novel.

Ford has the reputation of a good writer but I feel with this novel he goes to great lengths to convince us that he deserves that title.


The best book I've ever read   March 5, 2002
 18 out of 22 found this review helpful

In some respects, "Independence Day" is the best book I've ever read. Richard Ford is simply brilliant at capturing the uncapturable.

He is definitely the most skilled writer I've ever read when it comes to translating onto the page just what goes on in the human mind and heart as they struggle to cope with pain, loss, disappointment, and ultimately regeneration.

"Independence Day" is an interior monologue chronicling three days in the life of Frank Bascombe, former sportswriter turned realty agent, who is attempting to make some sort of real connection with his estranged teenage son. At the same time, Frank is struggling to be reborn from a self-imposed but seemingly inevitable cocoon of mid-life, post-divorce complacency, which he has termed "the existence period".

Ford's perception and empathy are his greatest tools as a writer. There are brilliantly beautiful moments of emotional honesty in this book that resonate like the searing afterimage of sunlight glimpsed on a stretch of side-of-the-road evening rail.

I cannot say enough good things about Richard Ford. I am in awe of him and would like to thank him for his wonderful contributions to my reading life. I highly recommend him to anyone who cares deeply about character and getting at what it means to be human. Ford once wrote, "If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure." Nothing could be more true of this wonderful book.


there may be nothing to control   April 30, 2000
 16 out of 23 found this review helpful

The most impressive page of this Pulitzer-winning novel would be numbered "-2". It is where the author thanks two foundations for paying him to stay home and write it. A great gift for your engineer friends, they'll think Richard Ford novelized the science fiction movie Independence Day. Actually the book is about a long uneventful weekend in the life of Frank Bascombe, a divorced real estate salesman in Haddam, New Jersey. Don't read it for the plot!

"Unmarried men in their forties, if we don't subside entirely into the landscape, often lose important credibility and can even attract unwholesome attention in a small, conservative community. And in Haddam, in my new circumstances, I felt I was perhaps becoming the personage I least wanted to be and, in the years since my divorce, had feared being: the suspicious bachelor, the man whose life has no mystery, the graying, slightly jowly, slightly too tanned and trim middle-ager, driving around town in a cheesy '58 Chevy ragtop polished to a squeak, always alone on balmy summer nights, wearing a faded yellow polo shirt and green suntans, elbow over the window top, listening to progressive jazz, while smiling and pretending to have everything under control, when in fact there was nothing to control."

I think that with those two sentences, Ford managed to say what his book was about. So I'll shut up.