Read more
Zusatztext “With a mastery second to none! Richard Ford has created a character we know as well as our next-door neighbors. Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape! but he has done so with a wry wit and a fin de siècle wisdom that is very much his own.” — The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor RICHARD FORD is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction. Ford's best known titles are The Sportswriter , Independence Day , The Lay of the Land , and Let Me Be Frank with You. Klappentext A trilogy of brilliant novels-The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land-that charts the life and times of one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction. When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed-by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, through Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, witnessing his fortune's rise and his family's fragmentation. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the most subtle nuances of the human condition-all its pathos and beauty and strangeness-Ford transforms this ordinary man's life into a riveting, moving parable of life in America today. I N T R O D U C T I O N —— Over the last twenty years, goodwilled readers have occasionally asked me if Frank Bascombe, the yearning, sometimes vexatious, narrator of the three novels that make up this sizeable volume – if Frank Bascombe was intended to be an American ‘‘everyman?’’ By this I think these readers mean: is Frank at least partly an emblem? Poised there in the final clattering quadrant of the last century, beset with dilemmas and joys, equipped with his suburban New Jersey skill-set and ethical outlook – do Frank’s fears, dedications, devilings and amusements stand somewhat for our own? Naturally, I’m flattered to hear such a question, since it might mean the questioner has read at least one of these books and tried to make use of it. And I can certainly imagine that a millennial standard-bearer might be worth having; a sort of generalizable, meditative, desk-top embodiment of our otherwise unapplauded selves – one who’s not so accurately drawn as to cause discomfort, but still recognizable enough to make us feel a bit more visible to ourselves, possibly re-certify us as persuasive characters in our own daily dramas. But the truth is that Frank Bascombe as ‘‘everyman’’ was never my intention. Not only would I have no idea how to go about writing such a full-service literary incarnation, but I’m also sure I’d find the whole business to be not much fun in the doing. And I still want to like what I’m doing. In nearly forty years of writing stories of varying lengths and shapes and, in the process, making up quite a large number of characters, I’ve always tried to abide by E. M. Forster’s famous dictum from Aspects of the Novel that says fictional characters should possess ‘‘the incalculability of life.’’ To me, this means that characters in novels (the ones we read and the ones we write) should be as variegated and vivid of detail and as hard to predict and make generalizations about as the people we actually meet every day. This incalculability would seem to have the effect of drawing us curiously nearer to characters in order to get a better, more discerning look at them, inasmuch as characters are usually the principal formal features by which fiction gets its many points across. These vivid, surprising details – themselves well-rendered in language – will be their own source of illuminating pleasure. And the w...
