Shlock of Recognition

...But if we had to give our literary age a name-a slogan and a title with which to pose it against all other literary ages-we could do far worse than dub it "Richard Ford" and remark that its latest work, Independence Day, just became the first novel to win both the Pulitzer prize and the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award...

...without being wise, they know what shape an insight has...

...Its vices are harder to describe precisely: a certain ennui that infects all highly stylized human activities, a prose that takes the form of revelation more often than it actually reveals anything...

...Along the way, he has dozens of deep insights about cigarette lighters, suburban lawns, and the strangeness of ex-wives...

...Though these are clearly intended to be the novel's major events, none of them is developed with any greater energy than anything else in Frank's life...

...Nonetheless, with the exceptions of Barbara Ehrenreich in the New Republic and David Myers in Commentary, the reviewers in the major newspapers and journals seemed almost in a contest to see who could cheer the loudest when the novel appeared last year, and the major prize committees have now joined in the wild chorus of acclaim...

...So that to the musical question 'What's it all about, Alfie?' I'm not sure I know the answer...

...After the death of another son and the divorce that set the background to The Sportswriter, Frank in Independence Day has entered what he calls his "Existence Period...

...The novelist has never given much bounce to either his characters or his plots...

...Though it's true," Frank declares in a typical passage, "that sometimes in the glide, when worries and contingencies are floating off, I sense myself am afloat and cannot always touch the sides of where I am, nor know what to expect...

...On nearly every page of Independence Day, what does the work of thought is recognition...

...Part of the explanation may be that Ford is a writer who has paid his dues...

...There's hardly a novelist now alive whose schooled prose cannot paint in sharp detail almost anything you'd care to name: a catastrophic train wreck, the death of a giant redwood tree, the way the tone-arm on an old Philco hi-fi would quiver just before it settled on the spinning 33.3...

...Without being witty, they know what humor looks like on the page...

...They have a literary instrument ready to say almost anything...

...And they have almost nothing ready to say with it...

...This has the shape of self-revelation, the form of a Socratic intuition, but under any close examination it comes apart like tissue paper and all that remains is the fillip of the ironic reference to a 1960s movie theme song...

...In the Age of Richard Ford, we discover that the sheer junk we already know is endlessly fascinating just because we already know it and we, of course, are fascinating...

...No one since Immanuel Kant has had as many insights as Ford's Frank Bascombe seems to have...

...At first blush, it's hard to see why, even in the Age of Ford, Independence Day should have won any thing besides the quick trip to the remainder bin that is the fate of most self-consciously fine writing...

...A typical Ford tale is a sort of anti-picaresque ramble in which a man takes a short and boring trip for some poorly analyzed but usually mundane reason...

...True to form, after his ex-wife shows up at the hospital and takes charge of the mess, the novel ends with Frank's Whitmanesque reflections on democracy, the Fourth of July, and how wonderful it is to share his insights with everyone: "I feel the push, pull, the weave and sway of others...

...But it is due in greater part to something newer, something that has changed since the days of Updike and Cheever and the other spielers of suburban angst...

...Though their shared culture seems limited to 1970s politics, 1960s pop music, and the batting lineups of the 1950s Yankees, they know how to work up other topics for one another...

...They know how to handle a gangster's strongest curses and they know how to capture a prima donna's lightest mood...

...Though Independence Day (Vintage, 451 pages, $13 paper) follows this Fordian pattern, it has an even duller setting and an even more uneventful plot than The Sports-writer (the widely praised 1986 novel to which it forms a sequel) or the 1980s Esquire and Granta magazine stories with which Ford made his reputation...

...Set over the Fourth of July in 1988, just as the Dukakis campaign against Bush begins to melt, the novel recounts a few days in the purportedly all-American life of the middle-aged Frank Bascombe, exstorywriter, ex-sportswriter, and ex-husband, now selling real estate in the Jersey suburbs...

...Frank's moralizing is so insistent, so ceaselessly observant, so chronically insightful, that it's a wonder the other characters in the novel don't bludgeon him to death...

...J. Bottum, associate editor of First Things, writes regularly on literary matters for The Weekly Standard...

...But, good trouper that he is, he also seems to take pride in performing his life well, and there emerges in the novel Ford's apparent belief in a perverse simulacrum of responsibility-as though what really keep middle-class men to their appointed middle-class duties are a bit-player's ironic professionalism and knowledge that the show must go on...

...Before he can head north, then, Frank must perform his ironically assumed responsibilities: convincing an obnoxious (and underfinanced) yuppie couple from Vermont to buy the house he has found for them, touching base with his partner at the root-beer stand, collecting the rent at his tenement, and breaking up with his girlfriend...

...This seems intended to mean that he lives his life like a bit part in a movie, keeping his emotional distance from other people and playing his role with a constant and self-conscious detachment...

...Indeed, the texture of detail and commentary for everything in the novel is so consistently rich that it is not humanly possible for Ford to deepen his descriptions even when he wants to...

...Its virtues are a teachable consensus about what constitutes good writing and a single-minded, unsmiling concentration on the art of it all...

...But first he's got some things to do-like locking up the office and starting his car and stopping his car and picking up the dry cleaning and starting his car again-to which the reader is treated in painterly detail while Frank's interior monologue provides a running commentary...

...These main events primarily serve to give Frank audiences and topics other than himself for his moralizing reflections...

...Our age, in other words, is an age of the literary academy, and it has all the virtues and all the vices Matthew Arnold promised when he urged English literature to build itself a counterpart to the Acad?mie Fran?aise...

...And yet, there is more to the book's success than writing-school fever...

...After what seems like hours spent listening to Frank's wisdom on how to hit the pitches from a mechanical pitching machine at baseball's hall of fame, the boy at last-and here comes the really bad event mandatory in any Ford tale-steps in front of a 70-mph fastball (probably in the vain hope of escaping any more of his father's ruminations about billboards, baseball, and boyhood) and gets plonked straight in the eye...

...Who wouldn't give prizes by the bushel for the sake of learning that...

...His girlfriend does finally kick him out, but only Frank's son manages to take the right line...

...Or perhaps we should call it the shlock of recognition, since the only things Ford trusts his readers to know are old pop culture and the odds and ends of franchised suburban life: the color of an M&M's package and the shape of a Jiffy Lube logo...

...Frank hopes to get away for the weekend, taking his disturbed 14-year-old boy on a father-and-son trip up north to the basketball and baseball halls of fame in Springfield and Coopers-town...

...The larger explanation for the success of Independence Day, however, may lie precisely in the unswerving dullness of the novel's New Jersey Turnpike setting and New Jersey realtor's plot-for this is Fordism filtered down to its essence, purified of any contaminating dramatic scenery or incident...

...Then something bad happens, usually something really bad, and the story ends with a last hopeful insight into the capacity of men with rich interior monologues to face a world in which really bad things happen...

...It is due in part to Ford's pandering to the old notion that you can have a middle-class life, with all its comfortable safety, and yet maintain a superiority to it, if only you declare a rueful irony about your loss of ideals and continue to vote for the Democrats: "Holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the 60s is getting hard as hell," Frank ruefully sighs as drives along with his Lick Bush bumper sticker...

...Independence Day is the work everybody who ever went to writing school hungers to produce: a novel so relentlessly fine, it's actually bad...

...He has attended the right college writing programs, he has written the right remaindered books, and, most important, he has had the right sort of easily definable career: first helping to found (with fellow "dirty realists" Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver) an identifiable literary school and then, with The Sportswriter, "growing beyond" it...