Let Me Be Frank with You (Ford) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Frank has become [Ford's] Everyman, as much a representative of middle-class American life and its discontents as John Updike's Harry Angstrom was for another generation in the Rabbit novels…[Let Me Be Frank With You] serves as an apt vitrine for Mr. Ford's talents: his journalistic eye for the revealing detail, his knack for tracing the connections between the public and the personal, his gift for capturing the precariousness of daily life…the fact that Let Me works as well as it does is a testament to Mr. Ford's strengths as a writer and his ability to turn his hero's contradictions and discontinuities into something more like the genuine complexities of a real human being.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Ford's prose retains its controlled tang, and despite its room-temperature tone can chill or warm a reader with startling immediacy…However wounded, the New Jersey we've come to know, from riding shotgun with Bascombe on interstates and back roads all these years, remains profoundly present and vibrantly distinct, no more an Anywhere, as the state's reputation mistakenly suggests, than Bascombe is an Everyman.
Jonathan Miles - New York Times Book Review


Of all the serial heroes bustling through postwar American fiction, Frank Bascombe makes the strongest claim on our affection… It is Mr. Ford’s achievement to have made the musings of this suburban everyman captivating.
Wall Street Journal


Now Frank has returned, ushering us through the four linked novellas in Let Me Be Frank With You—which arrives, like an early Christmas gift, to soothe fans who assumed they’d never again have the pleasure of wading through his stream of consciousness.
Washington Post


Let Me Be Frank With You marks the fourth book that Frank [Bascombe] has taken center-stage, and the four stories offered between its covers find the character now deep into his waning years—the age that Frank refers to as his "Default Period of life."
NPR, The Two-Way


Incredibly, Ford maintains, over 30 years, Frank’s voice-he sounds much as he did when he was 38, except he is a little more prone to pontificating… This is what gripped readers on the first page of The Sportswriter…and what continues in Let Me Be Frank With You.
Chicago Tribune


[Frank Bascombe is] as ruminative as ever, continually brooding over past and present; as ironic as ever, flippantly naming his retirement status  "The Next Level"... And this Mississippi-born gentleman also remains as charming and gracious as ever… [A] substantial work of fiction… [a] sharp-eyed collection.
Newsday (Long Island, NY)


Four novellas featuring Frank Bascombe, the main character from three of Ford’s most highly acclaimed novels. Bascombe is older, and though he may not think he’s any wiser, readers will disagree.
San Francisco Chronicle


Ford steers clear of autobiography in his fiction, but his ability to tease out the psychological nuances of his heroes has made him a legend.
New Orleans Times-Picayune


The stories…serve as vehicles for Frank’s witty, sad, poignant and incisive ruminations on life in America in the early 21st century... Readers of the Bascombe trilogy… are sure to be delighted at this unexpected opportunity to renew their acquaintance with Frank and see how he’s coping with life’s changes.
Associated Press


The American master returns with another dispatch from Frank Bascombe.
San Antonio Express-News


Funny, touching and profound… Threading its way through all four tales is Frank’s (Ford’s) sometimes chilling, always wry take on mortality… The ability of slight things to forestall reflection on the weightiest of issues is Ford’s rich theme here, and no one mines it more eloquently.
Financial Times


The beauty of this book lies in its encompassing humanity, its juxtaposition of gravity and wit, and the flawed duality of our protagonist… Ford illuminates parts of us all.
Portland Press Herald


The Pulizer Prize-winner ricochets off his "Frank Bascombe Trilogy" of novels (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land) with four themed stories told by Bascombe, his insightful, funny and irreverent main character now living in New Jersey
Sacramento Bee


In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving and wondrous and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment.
Jackson Free Press


[Subtle] stories told with wit and grace… Ford has established himself as one of contemporary America’s most interesting storytellers. Let Me Be Frank With You does nothing to diminish this well-deserved reputation.
New York Journal of Books


Ford is celebrated for his Frank Bascombe novels—stories swirling around the life of a middle-aged real estate agent. His profession lends itself to Ford’s rich descriptions of natural land. Here, Ford places Bascombe in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (Best Books for Fall 2014).
Huffington Post


A quartet of stories set around Christmas 2012 (each Bascombe volume co-opts a holiday), amid the physical and emotional debris of Hurricane Sandy, it’s an estimable book-wise, funny and superbly attentive to the world. If this is the last of Bascombe, it’s an honorable end.
Time


Bascombe is a little grumpier than before but no less introspective...As in the previous books, his fast-running internal commentary on those neighbors...is the book’s engine, streaming along, carrying us from one scene to the next and binding them all together.
Town & Country


Frank has reached his twilight years with his trademark wit and ruminative self-awareness intact, even if his body is starting to slide into geriatric betrayal...There’s no doubt that this is the same old Frank
Entertainment Weekly


[F]our absorbing, funny, and often profound novellas.... Frank’s cranky comments and free-flowing meditations about current social and political events are slyly juxtaposed with references to Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Trollope, Emerson, Milton, and others. Despite Frank’s dyspeptic outlook, Ford packs in a surprising amount of affirmation and redemption.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A]after an eight-year hiatus, Frank is back, once again summing up an important American moment by wrestling with the displacement caused by Hurricane Sandy.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [C]austically hilarious, warmly philosophical, and emotionally lush… In each neatly linked tale, Frank ruminates misanthropically, wittily, and wisely about love, family, friendship, race, politics, and the mystery of the self…Like Frank, Ford, certainly is incisively frank, forensically observant, and covertly tender.
Booklist


The novelist returns with his favorite protagonist for a coda that is both fitting and timely.... [T]here are a couple of revelations that might disturb a man who felt more, but plot is secondary here to Frank's voice, which remains at a reflective remove from whatever others are experiencing. Another Bascombe novel would be a surprise, but so is this—a welcome one
Kirkus Reviews