Frankly, my dear

[Posted 10:26 PM by Stefan Beck]

I’m all for a lit tourney. What better way to force people to admit that they hate a book! (For a change!) All the same, Maud Newton’s flat-footed pan of Richard Ford’s latest and greatest was harder to take than Colin Meloy’s awkward Thunderdome-themed appreciation of same. Look at it: Much of her review is a laundry list of the protagonist’s multitude of sins against taste:

Bascombe, a “southern-raised frat boy,” is a transplant to New Jersey who’s getting on in years. . . . He sells houses, lusts after his daughter’s girlfriend (who is “teeth-gnashingly beautiful,” unlike “your standard lesbian”), fantasizes about punching people, repeatedly congratulates himself for his good sense in voting for Gore rather than “idiot Bush,” and drives an SUV. Boy, does he ever drive that Chevy Suburban: up and down the turnpike, through every ethnic neighborhood in the vicinity, surveying the passersby as he goes. At one intersection stands a “shiny-legged Latina” whose “stiff little butt” faces oncoming traffic. A large man who steps out of a Cadillac is probably Italian, although his “spruced-up appearance” suggests he could be Greek, which “wouldn’t be better.” Here we have some “Chinamen.” There we have the academy where “even the Arab and Sri Lankan kids” are rich. And in the Northeast, in 1999, we have a multitude of “Negroes.” . . . [A] “giant, coffee-black Negro” throws a brick through the beloved SUV’s back windshield, enabling Bascombe to while away the evening in a lesbian bar with a “swamp-water coon-ass”-accented bartender . . . . To be fair, Bascombe’s Tibetan business advisor emerges as a more fully-developed character. Mike Mahoney—Lobsand Dhargey being “too much of a word sandwich” for Mike’s first American coworkers—is a talented businessman, although he most often serves in these pages as Frank’s chauffeur and potential doorway to Buddhism. He’s “easy to picture . . . in a magenta robe and sandals, sporting a yellow horn hat and blowing a ceremonial trumpet off the craggy side of Mount Qomolangma.” . . . Mike attains full co-broker status, having proved himself adept at selling houses to “beige-skinned” buyers and “monied subcontinentals.”

Boo hoo, such a bummer to read about people who aren’t just like me. Maud covers herself: Bascombe “is neither a particularly sympathetic character nor sufficiently fascinating in his unpleasantness.” She compares him to Humbert Humbert (sufficiently fascinating in his unpleasantness), unaware that Bascombe isn’t meant to be a villain just because he uses the odd ethnic slur.

Be sympathetic or be a monster, but nothing in between. Since when is contemporary fiction meant to work on this Beowulf-Grendel axis? Perhaps there’s truth to the idea that humankind cannot bear very much reality—the boring kind, that is, the kind surrounding us in the form of our ordinary friends and neighbors. If you ask me, “southern-raised frat boy” Frank Bascombe makes for better reading than this faux-Southern Gothic. That’s coming from a fan of Flannery O’Connor—but I bet she wouldn’t sniff at a fully-formed human character because he has a dull job and doesn’t know not to say “Negro.” Better luck next time.

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