Read Series: Frank Bascombe
by Author Richard Ford
Independence Day (2015)
Richard Ford’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel Independence Day, in my eyes, officially marks the author as the last and possibly greatest GMN* of the twentieth-century. I was impressed but not blown away by the first novel in his trilogy, The Sportswriter, in which we meet Frank Bascombe, a complic...
The Sportswriter (1995)
There’s a scene in the first chapter of The Sportswriter that lays bare the novel’s heart. Frank Bascombe and his ex-wife—referred to as X throughout—arrive home from a night out to find their house ransacked. In making a list of the missing items for the police, X finds letters from another woma...
The Lay of the Land (2006)
A digressive, long-winded, over-adjectived, frequently-hyphenated contemplation of the middle-aged, middle-classed, middle-of-the-road American...Frank Bascombe sets out to have a meeting with his ex-wife. Five immensely tedious reading hours later and nearly a third of the way through the book, ...