Online-Bibliothek

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.

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.

This is the story of Frank Bascombe's transition from his Existence Period to his Permanent Period, neither term I entirely understand, even after 450 pages. An interesting, life-like aspect of Frank is that he seems to be a different person in his life than when he's narrating the story. As Frank's hot-dog vendor employee says, "Frank, you seem one way and are another." And so we all are. Frank's not the most likable guy in the world, but he's real, with real, believable concerns about his life.The book just didn't click with me. Maybe I'm too young at 37 to understand the Existence Period, maybe I just wanted something (anything!) to happen. So though I liked the book's style (similar to a favorite author, John Updike), I'm still left unsatisfied.

I know this forum is not a place to cast aspersions but I've noticed something from reading through the previous reviews.This book could serve as a litmus test between the intelligent, thoughtful people you would like to know (those who liked the book) and the shallow, dull, easily confused individuals whom you should avoid.This is a work of genius. If you are at all literate and enjoy American fiction you will enjoy this book immensely.

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.