Independence Day Richard Ford

...Though they celebrate "independence," Ford's characters are obviously dependent on one another, as if each one were a bird with one wounded wing who by hooking up with the other birds could flutter to safety...

...He will impart his fatherly wisdom, and, at the same time, by having Paul read the Declaration of Independence and Emerson's "Self Reliance," and by chatting in the car about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, he will enlist American history in his struggle for the boy's salvation...

...Frank fears the boy, once a lover of pigeons, may have killed a grackle just for kicks...

...Then he was ready for a fling in Florida with Cathy Flaherty, a Dartmouth student who admired his writing...

...Which is why, perhaps, Richard Ford, in his new novel, Independence Day, his continuation of The Sportswriter (1986), has moved Frank Bascombe, his narrator and protagonist, from sports magazine journalism into the real-estate business...

...In one startling, yet plausible, surprise, Frank's long-lost Jewish half-brother appears like a biblical angel at a moment of crisis to remind him of the hidden continuity that has linked his life...

...The implements of their connectedness-cellular phones, gas station pay phones, voice mail, helicopters, sex manuals, the Trenton Times, a discarded volume of Frank's short stories, routes 1,91, and 84, and a people-mover in the Basketball Hall of Fame arena from which the tourists shoot baskets-are hardly spiritual...

...He goes around barking for his long-dead dog, and, in banter with his father, likes to talk dirty...

...But occasionally they make possible what Ford terms that "Sistine Chapel touch," when two fingertips meet, and Richard Ford continues to create, in this stunning book, what William Dean Howells stated as his own goal, a "literature worthy of America...

...He was a good, though rootless, man, a seeker who struck others as having a "sense of ethics," though he consistently denies having the admirable traits which others perceive...

...He daily redraws the line of the shifting American Frontier-charts the highways, Shop Rite malls, suburban enclaves, shrines, motels, trailer parks, and honky tonks which speckle the skin over the American soul-and matches this particular acre with its two-bedroom clapboard bungalow with this particular migrant family's dream...

...His plan: "to do for others while looking after Number One...

...Though Independence Day opens with Frank's seriocomic analysis of the Haddam real-estate business as the town gears up for the holiday weekend, the novel's focus soon becomes Frank's troubled fifteen-year-old son Paul...

...Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is a professor of journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans...

...Frank has moved into Ann's former house in Haddam, has had his fling with Cathy in France, had another affair with a black real-estate partner who was later raped and murdered, keeps a girlfriend Sally in Mantoloking, and strives to apply his Good Samaritan instincts to real estate, taking good care of his two properties in a black neighborhood and dealing fairly and patiently with a thug-gish client couple from Vermont...

...Perhaps as a sign of how American culture has coarsened, so has Frank's narrative vocabulary, and he occasionally addresses us in a vulgar lingo-of which The Sportswriter was relatively free...

...We liked Frank, perhaps because he didn't judge, and we thought he might like us...

...Frank's wife Ann has married a rich, sixty-one-year-old architect, who "knows Bush," and taken the children to Connecticut...

...Bush and Dukakis are squabbling for the presidency...

...Still, I cannot jog the oak-lined streets of Uptown New Orleans or bike up Storm King Mountain at Cornwall-on-Hudson without casing every house I pass and asking if that house is "me...

...For the realtor, if he has moved his science to the level of art, is part social historian, part character analyst...

...Yet Ford's men and women, though they suffer from the American virus of excessive individualism, yearn to be connected...

...Friends describe him as "sweet" and "priestly...

...When we pick him up this 1988 fourth-of-July weekend, Frank is forty-four, and he and the nation which he both embodies and meticulously observes have, like an untended piece of property, gone down...

...but we like him a little less...

...Paul has grown fat, sloppy, and injury-prone, been arrested for shoplifting condoms, slugged his stepfather, and wrecked the family car...

...and we wondered-hoping-whether he would return to his wife and to the serious fiction from which sportswriting had distracted him...

...Displaying again his astonishing mastery of New Jersey, Connecticut, Mas-sachusetts, and New York roadmaps-their physical as well as moral landscapes-Ford sweeps us in a four-day whirl through an election-year America which de Tocqueville foretold-filled with ambitious men but empty of lofty ambitions: Where Roy Rogers is not a cowboy hero but a fast-food joint on the Jersey Turnpike, where virtually everyone is divorced, where murder is almost as commonplace as the car alarm whining and whooping in the night, where the suspicious-looking Mexican youths cruising by your hot dog stand really are getting set to rob you, where the neighborhood cop or the "polite" security guard with the gold stud in his ear symbolizes not security but the intimations of the coming police state...

...When we left Frank Bascombe in Easter week six years ago, he was thirty-eight, a Haddam (Princeton), New Jersey, recently divorced father of a boy and girl and a dead son whom he and his ex-wife (called "X") still mourned...

...By his own lights as good a parent as he can be, Frank plans to "rescue" the boy by taking him on a holiday tour of the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York...

...And where, especially if we have read Ford's other books, we sense a catastrophe lurking around the bend...

...Ironically, Frank is also reverting to sports nostalgia, which Ford eviscerated in The Sportswriter, as if Cooperstown were an American Mecca, or Rome, or Lourdes, where exposure to the Great Pastime in its purest form could heal the scars of death and divorce...