The story of Frank Bascombe, a sports-writer turned estate agent but always a New Jersey homebody, has already taken Richard Ford nearly 30 years and three volumes to tell, totalling 1,300 pages — longer than War and Peace. But for Frank, aged 68 (and for Ford, aged 70), it’s not over. In the autumn of 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New Jersey shoreline. And though Bascombe is retired from real estate and living safely inland in Haddam (the town where his first-person chronicles began, in 1986, with The Sportswriter) he is not unaffected by the devastation. In the four long stories that comprise this fourth Bascombe volume, he learns that his former beach house has been destroyed. A woman made homeless by Sandy has retreated to Haddam and shows up at Frank’s door. Frank’s second wife Sally, a grief counsellor, tends the storm’s elderly victims, and is needed more than ever — because it’s Christmas.
But Frank is cheerful, and isn’t even that disturbed by the news that his first wife, now suffering from Parkinson’s, has moved into assisted-living quarters in his neighbourhood. It’s hard to know what actually sustains Frank; his only work is reading V.S. Naipaul on the radio a few hours a week for the blind, and greeting returning servicemen from Afghanistan at the airport. He has few friends — and indeed gleefully acknowledges that he is ‘jettisoning’ them all the time. This has made ‘death mean a great deal less’ to him, ‘and life a great deal more’. But what is his life exactly?
Sally thinks it interesting enough to warrant him writing his memoirs — she calls it his ‘trajectory’. Frank is dismissive of the word — but what he describes as a view of ‘life in terms of failures survived, leaving the horizon gratifyingly — but briefly — clear of obstructions’, will sound to some very much like a ‘trajectory’.
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