I haven’t read the first four in the series, so I was at a disadvantage to understand Frank’s previous world. Especially, learning that the author's book in the series: Independence Day won The Pulitzer. By the time they embark on their road trip—knowing, as they’ve always known, that no miracle cure will present itself—every step Paul takes, every gesture, is a struggle. Even when he sits, his right hand trembles, “clenching and curling”; knees shudder; feet fidget. His life “pares down to arch necessities—ambulation, swallowing, talking, breathing.” Devastating as this is for Paul, it also takes a heavy toll on an already death-haunted Frank, who early in the novel scattered the ashes of his first wife. “If three house moves are the psychic equivalent of a death, a son’s diagnosis of ALS is equal to crashing your car into a wall day after day, with the outcome always the same.” In Be Mine, Bascombe reveals a continuing desire for life, even in the face of his terrible loss: “It’s not cold-hearted or mechanical, but yes, his impulse, after his son dies, is to go on living, and it would probably be mine, too, after a while. Human beings are amazing, as amazing as the imagination will let them be. There’s no one way to cope with the death of a son and there’s no one way to live.” Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colorful lives—sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent—Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all: caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS. On a shared winter odyssey to Mount Rushmore, Frank, in typical Bascombe fashion, faces down the mortality that is assured each of us, and in doing so confronts what happiness might signify at the end of days.

Be Mine by Richard Ford | Book review | The TLS

In the book Frank seems trapped between the present of his experience with Paul’s illness and memories of the past. Does Ford reflect more on the past as he gets older?

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The two faces of tragedy and comedy are always joined, for me,” says Ford. “It wasn’t always important to me. But as I got on with life, and realised I was trying to write great books, in those [other] great books I cared about was tragedy and comedy joined.” How cruel to keep killing off poor Frank’s children! (Bascombe also has a daughter, with whom he does not get on.) It’s against nature. Why did he do it? Shouldn’t it really be Frank who’s for the chop? Ford’s eyes are a famous shade of aquamarine and they consider me now, rather coolly. Don’t I know, his expression says, how horribly ruthless novelists can be? “I’m such a conventional writer,” he finally says. “I just couldn’t figure out any way that I could have written that book. I mean, I didn’t want to write as a… ghost.”

Book Review: ‘Be Mine,’ by Richard Ford - The New York Times

Frank drives Paul out to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he will be analyzed and studied, not cured. Paul’s condition is rapidly deteriorating, and Frank finds himself in the role of caretaker, assisting his son increasingly more often in performing his basic functions. The two men are constantly sparring with one another, with a sarcasm and gallows humor both witty and morbid. The four chiseled visages. L to R—Washington (the father), Jefferson (the expansionist), Roosevelt #1 (the ham, snugged in like an imposter) and stone-face Lincoln, the emancipator (though there are fresh questions surrounding that). None of these candidates could get a vote today—slavers, misogynists, homophobes, warmongers, historical slyboots, all playing with house money. Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive, and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is once more our guide to the great American midway. President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face filled the TV screen behind the honor bar, doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini. I couldn’t take my eyes off him – tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.”Age, forgetting, fathers, children, happiness: the scene is set. We switch to Rochester, Minnesota, where Frank’s unpleasant 47-year-old son Paul is taking part in a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic. Paul has a form of motor neurone disease; his prognosis is terminal. Frank cares for him; Paul resents his care. They are “joined unwillingly at the heart”. The action of the novel shows Frank taking Paul in a rented RV to see America’s stone presidents at Mount Rushmore – one last performance in “the theatre of lasts”. Ford is far too subtle to make an explicit connection between Paul’s degenerative disease and whatever has happened to our nation, but those four “granitudinally white faces” inevitably evoke an absent other. On a television screen in an airport lounge a few months earlier, Frank had caught a glimpse of “President Trump’s swollen, eyes-bulging face … doing his pooch-lipped, arms-folded Mussolini.” He’s got his number: “tuberous limbs, prognathous jaw, looking in all directions at once, seeking approval but not finding enough.”