“In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems” (opening line).
The first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in a single year, Richard Ford’s Independence Day is a unique work of American realism that carries echoes of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom series. It follows a particular fourth of July weekend in the meandering life of middle-aged former sportswriter turned realtor, Frank Bascombe, as he mulls over his past and his various relationships, from his troubled son to his girlfriend and even his ex-wife. Independence Day is a sequel to Ford’s 1986 novel The Sportswriter, and it was followed by three subsequent novels in the series The Lay of the Land (2006), Let Me Be Frank With You (2014), and Be Mine (2023).
Frank Bascombe is a real estate agent in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey where “…falling property values now ride through the trees like an odorless, colorless mist settling through the still air where all breathe it in…” (4). He is a divorced father of two and has abandoned his career as a sportswriter (as depicted in the previous novel The Sportswriter), as well as his pursuit of short story writing, a pursuit he ended some eighteen years ago. He is now living in the former home of his ex-wife. Frank has lately become a reflective man as he enters his “Existence Period.” He ponders his place in the world, sometimes he is depressed about the past, other times he is anxious about the future (and he is always aware of his own impending death). He seems to be unable to let go of memories, like the loss of the family dog Mr. Toby, or the unsolved murder of his former girlfriend, a black woman with children named Clair who later wound up dead in a “bad situation.”
The year is 1988 and the upcoming Dukakis vs. Bush presidential election on everyone’s minds. Frank is skeptical of Reagan and right-wing propaganda. He is a self-described “yellow dog Democrat,” or “a Democrat of the New Deal bent” who “considers most Republicans and particularly V.P. Bush barely mentionable dickheads” (239). He spends much of the novel driving around in his Crown Vic with a “LICK BUSH” bumper sticker proudly displayed. There are a number of humorous moments like this throughout the novel. As a realtor, he uses his job of selling real estate as a philosophical means of understanding people. For Frank, property values are a kind of index of national well-being and so it’s interesting that Frank, himself, owns two homes in a predominantly black neighborhood called “Wallace Hill.”
Independence Day is a deeply ponderous novel. For what it lacks in plot, it makes up for in characterization. Over the course of the July Fourth holiday weekend, readers are introduced to a myriad of lively figures, such Frank’s wishy-washy “donkeyish” clients Joe and Phyllis Markham, or Karl Bemish with whom Frank co-owns a root beer stand, as well as his nebulous romantic relationship with Sally Caldwell, a tall leggy blond who seems to be on the outs with Frank at varying points in the novel (he likens their relationship to “a small plane flying over a peaceful ocean with no one exactly in command”). Indeed, this might be an apt for metaphor for much of Frank’s life in this “Existence Period.” Things feel neither high nor low, but decidedly out of control, vague, tedious, and filled with ennui. Something is missing. Frank explains that his life “swerved badly” seven years ago when he and his wife, Ann Dykstra, got divorced. It is a break-up he still doesn’t seem to fully understand. In his more favorable interpretation of the divorce, Frank claims Sally simply couldn’t handle his “various aberrations of grief and longing” over the death of their first son, Ralph, who died of Reye’s syndrome, but Sally argues the cause was Frank being just too much of a cynical, two-timing jerk (she says he “may be the most cynical man in the world”).
Ann is now married to an established architect named Charley O’Dell (whom Frank naturally despises) and they live in Connecticut with the two children: troubled fifteen-year-old Paul and twelve-year-old Clarissa “Clary” who is “as sage as Paul is callow.” Paul is experiencing behavioral issues. He is diagnosed by therapists with being “emotionally underdeveloped,” he randomly barks like a dog, and he was recently arrested for stealing a bunch of 4X magnum condoms, apparently as a practical joke on her mother’s husband Charley O’Dell, however, during the course of the theft he fought back against a female Vietnamese security guard and she is now suing him.
For the latter half of the novel, Frank takes his troubled son on a lengthy Fourth of July road trip in an effort to reconnect with him and hopefully reset him back on the right path (July 4th is Frank’s favorite secular holiday and it is nearly the anniversary of his divorce with Ann). They drive throughout the east coast stopping at tourist markers of Americana, especially the Basketball Hall of Fame (Springfield, Massachusetts) and the Baseball Hall of Fame (Cooperstown, New York), while also noticing the remnants of cultural and economic decay along the way (old factory buildings, derelict fast-food joints, and so on). Frank reflects on how thankless, frustrating, and demoralizing it is to be a parent at times as his relationship with his snide, snarky son goes up and down every few minutes. They end up in Cooperstown at the climax of the novel wherein, at a batting cage, Frank and his son argue, trash-talk one another, and get into a scuffle before Paul inches closer to the path of the pitch machine until it blasts a 75-mile-per-hour fastball right at his face, severely injuring his eye with a dilation to the upper left arc of his retina. He is transported to a hospital in Oneonta and then to Manhattan. The whole dilemma allows for a brief but fairly renewed connection of sorts between Frank and his ex-wife. But as with everything in Independence Day, nothing is ever really concluded or consummated and no questions are ever fully answered. Things remain unspoken and unresolved. Sometimes characters come and go seemingly without point or purpose –a young policeman named Erik who interrogates Frank near a bird sanctuary, a flirty woman drinking at a bar named Charlane “Char,” and so on.
Perhaps this vagueness is an intentional examination of a central theme in Independence Day –the idea of independence both in the particular sense of Frank Bascombe, as well as in the larger American sense of independence on the Fourth of July. What is independence to a middle-aged single man like Frank Bascombe? Is it good? Does it make him happy? Or is he left alienated and bitter? Throughout the novel Frank varyingly cites Emerson’s Self-Reliance as a key influence on his life, yet there seems to be a broad disconnect between the American ideal of independence and the real lived-experience of an antihero like Frank Bascombe as he settles into the malaise of a life adrift from his family, girlfriend, ex-wife, friends, and clients. To what extent does Frank Bascombe represent a kind of critical archetype of American independence? Much like the cultural myth that baseball was founded in 1839, or that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July fourth, there is a certain degree of fakery and shallow tourism in the idea of American independence, at least according to Frank Bascombe.
From the vantage point of his “Existence Period” Frank concludes the novel awaiting his forthcoming “Permanent Period” which is a “long stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person’s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world –if it makes note at all—knows of me, how I’m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that’s wild and unassuageable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion” (450).
Independence Day is a thought-provoking novel in the vein of other 20th century giants like John Updike and Philip Roth (though admittedly I appreciated Richard Ford’s prose far more than Updike’s). Every time I thought I was getting simply too bored to carry on with Independence Day, Richard Ford’s inviting prose beckoned me in for another chapter. It offers a remarkable study of the New Jersey region, from the towns to the turnpike, especially Haddam with its struggling real estate prices and rising crime, however, I cannot say I enjoyed much the experience of reading hundreds of pages about a wayward middle-aged man experiencing a kind of restless dissatisfaction with life. Still, to my surprise, Independence Day is often lauded as an American classic. Upon initial release, Michiko Kakutani penned a review in The New York Times in which he said: “Mr. Ford has galvanized his reputation as one of his generation’s most eloquent voices” and Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in The New Republic: “Most reviewers of Independence Day have concluded that Richard Ford is one of the great American writers of our time. Surely they underestimate him. Anybody who can keep the reader going through 451 pages about a holiday weekend in the life of a New Jersey realtor—a weekend in which nothing much happens except for some pitstops at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Vince Lombardi Rest Stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, and other locations that I experience, even in literary form, as personal hell—is more than a great writer of our time. He may be the greatest writer of all time.”
Notable Quotations:
“In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems” (opening line).
“A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you’ll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon” (5).
“All of this comes –in surfeit—near the anniversary of my divorce, a time when I routinely feel broody and insubstantial, and spend days puzzling over that summer seven years ago, when life swerved badly and I, somehow at a loss, failed to right its course” (7).
“My fatherly job, needless to say, is not at all easy at this enforced distance of miles: to coax by some middleman’s charm his two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship –like separate, angry nations seeking one government—and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future. This, of course, is what any father should do in any life, and I have tried, despite the impediments of divorce and time and not always knowing my adversary” (15).
“A parent’s view of what’s wrong or right with his kid is probably less accurate than even the next-door neighbor’s, who sees the child’s life perfectly through a gap in the curtain” (16).
“Buying a house will, after all, partly determine what they’ll be worrying about but don’t yet know, what consoling window views they’ll be taking (or not), where they’ll have bitter arguments and make love, where and under what conditions they’ll feel trapped by life or safe from the storm, where those spirited parts of themselves they’ll eventually leave behind (however over-prized) will be entombed, where they might die or get sick and wish they were dead, where they’ll return after funerals or after they’re divorced, like I did” (43).
“They are the lonely, haunted people soon to be seen stabding ijn a driveway or sitting on a couch or a cramped patio chair (wherever they land next), peering disconcertedly into a TV camera while being interviewed by the six o’clock news not merely as average Americans but as people caught in the real estate crunch, indistinct members of an indistinct class they don’t want to be members of –the frustrated, the ones on the bubble, the ones who suffer, those forced to live anonymous and glum on short cul-de-sac streets after the builder’s daughter or her grade-school friends” (90).
“My view was, keep your costs down, make it simple, don’t permit yourself the luxury of boredom build up a clientele, then later sell to some doofus who can go broke making your idea ‘better.’ (None of this had I ever done, of course: all I’d done was buy two rental houses and sell my own house to buy my ex-wife’s –hardly qualifying me for the trading pit)” (134).
“I am not sure what chokes me up: either the place’s familiarity or its rigid reluctance to act familiar. It is another useful theme and exercise of the Existence Period, and a patent lesson of the realty profession, to cease sanctifying places –houses, beaches, hometowns, a street corner where you once kissed a girl, a parade ground where you marched in line, a courthouse where you secured a divorce on a cloudy day in July but where there is now no sign of you, no mention in the air’s breath that you were there or that you were ever, importantly you, or that you even were. We may feel they ought to, should confer something –sanction, again—because of events that transpired there once; light a warming fire to animate us when we’re well nigh inanimate and sunk. But they don’t. Places never cooperate by revering you back when you need it. In fact, they almost always let you down, as the Markhams found out in Vermont and now New Jersey. Best just to swallow back your tear, get accustomed to the minor sentimentals and shove off to whatever’s next, not whatever was. Place means nothing” (151-152).
“…whereas in marriage there’s the gnashing, cold but also cozy fear that after a while there’ll be no me left, only me chemically amalgamated with another, the proposition with Sally is that there’s just me. Forever. I alone would go on being responsible for everything that had me in it; no cushiony chemistry or heady synchronicity to fall back on, no other, only me and my acts, her and hers, somehow together –which of course is much more fearsome” (177).
“Death, veteran that I am, seems so near now, so plentiful, so oh-so drastic nd significant, that it scares me witless” (217).
“…when you’re divorced you’re always wondering (I am anyway, sometimes to the point of granite preoccupation) what your ex-spouse is thinking about you” (247).
“‘I divorced you, she says slowly and meticulously, ‘because I didn’t like you. and I didn’t like you because I didn’t trust you’” (252-253, Ann talking to Frank).
“Being a parent can be the worst of discontents” (266).
“‘I love you,’ I say, totally startling myself. A tide of another nature has just swirled me into very deep, possibly dark water. These words are not untrue, or don’t feel untrue, but I didn’t need to say them at this very moment (though only an asshole would take them back)” (307).
“Children, who sometimes may be angels of self-discovery, are other times the worst people in the world” (359).
“A languor in Ann’s voice made me think of the last year of our marriage, eight years ago nearly, when we made love half waking in the middle of the night (and only then), half aware, half believing the other might be someone else, performing love’s acts in a half-ritual, half-blind, purely corporeal way that never went on long and didn’t qualify much or dignify passion, so vaguely willed and distant from true intimacy was it, so inhabited by longing and dread. (This was not long after Ralph’s death)… But where had passion gone? I wondered it all the time. And why, when we needed it so? The morning after such a night’s squandering, I’d wake and feel I’d done good for humanity but not much for anyone I knew. Ann would act as if she’d had a dream she only remotely remembered as pleasant. And then it was over for a long time, until our needs would once more rise (sometimes weeks and weeks later) and, aided by sleep, our ancient fears suppressed, we would meet again” (410).
“(The complex dilemma of independence is not so simple a matter, which is why we fight to be known by how hard we try rather than by how completely succeed)” (429).
“…holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell” (439).
The 1996 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1996 Pulitzer Fiction jury consisted of the following three individuals (including returning juror Gail Caldwell):
- Chair: Gail Caldwell (1951-present) was born and raised in Amarillo, Texas and attended Texas Tech University before transferring to the University of Texas at Austin where she obtained two degrees in American studies. She was an instructor at the University of Texas until 1981 and taught feature writing at Boston University before working as the arts editor of the Boston Review and wrote for other publications like the New England Monthly and the Village Voice. However, she was primarily renowned for her many years serving as the chief book critic for The Boston Globe (1985-2009). Caldwell would later win the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. She served several times on the fiction jury for the Pulitzer Prize; serving as chair of the jury in both 1995 and 1997. As of the time I am writing this review, she apparently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has written three memoirs: A Strong West Wind (2006), Let’s Take the Long Way Home (2010), and New Life, No Instructions (2014). She has been open about her childhood bout of polio and her struggles with alcoholism.
- David Gates (1947-present) is a novelist and journalist. His debut novel Jernigan was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received his BA from the University of Connecticut in 1972. He has written other novels and short stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and other publications. He was a former Guggenheim Fellow, taught creative writing at The University of Montana, and prior to 2008, Gates worked as a senior writer, editor, and book and music reviewer in the Arts section of Newsweek magazine.
- Lorrie Moore (1957-present) is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She attended St. Lawrence University and received her MFA from Cornell University. Upon graduation from Cornell, Moore was encouraged by a teacher to contact literary agent Melanie Jackson who agreed to take her on as a client. In 1983, Melanie Jackson sold Moore’s short story collection Self-Help to Knopf. Many of the stories in the collection were stories from her master’s thesis. She has since published several other short story collections, a few novels, a children’s book, and an essay collection. She has been the recipient of numerous awards from a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to a Guggenheim fellowship. She won an O. Henry Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, and her novel I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Lorrie Moore has had a lengthy academic career, teaching at universities like Cornell University, the University of Michigan, Princeton, NYU, the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At present, she is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
The jury submitted three nominees to the Pulitzer Board in December 1995: Independence Day by Richard Ford, Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos (who previously won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, click here for my full review), and Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth which won the National Book Award (Roth was previously a Pulitzer finalist in 1980 for The Ghost Writer, and again in 1984 for Operation Shylock: A Confession; he would finally win the prize a couple years later in 1998 for American Pastoral).
While as per usual the Pulitzer Board deliberations are kept confidential, the jury report “citation” for Independence Day was as follows:
“In ‘Independence Day’ Ford brings back the hero of his 1986 novel ‘The Sportswriter,’ Frank Bascombe: once a writer of serious fiction, now devolved into an affable, quasi-sincere real estate agent. By ratcheting him down another spiritual notch, Ford has brought Frank closer to the mainstream of American experience: unlike so many literary novelists, Ford actually knows and cares how ordinary business gets done. More important, he has made Frank Bascombe as large, distinct and resonant a character as any in recent fiction.
Real estate –with all its pastoral promises and attendant ironies—is the novel’s central metaphor. And Frank, too many-minded to get a handle on himself, is a representative man for a centrifugal, echoingly referential culture. He tries to act honorably, yet for him everything is ‘in quotes’; in place of a self, he has a persona. He wouldn’t mind, he says, ending up as ‘the dean of New Jersey realtors,’ though he knows he’s too smart for such a conventional aspiration and such trite language; he’s impersonating the adult every adult fails to become. Frank’s misbegotten attempt to give his troubled son the sort of all-American satori he himself can’t believe in –discussing Emerson and visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame on the Fourth of July—ends in disaster. But ‘Independence Day’ ends in triumph, thanks to Frank Bascombe’s addled but dogged decency, and to Richard Ford’s artistry in making their decency credible, admirable and profoundly moving.”
Who is Richard Ford?
Richard Ford (1944-present) was born in Jackson, Mississippi (in interviews he speaks with a charming Southern drawl). He is the only son of a traveling salesman and a homemaker. Ford’s father suffered cardiac issues throughout his youth which led Ford to spend time with his grandfather. Eventually his father died of a heart attack in 1960. While in Jackson, Ford lived across the street from the home of author and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty.
Ford received a BA from Michigan State University in 1966 (where he met his future wife Kristina Hensley), and an MA from UC Irvine in 1970 where he studied under the likes of E. L. Doctorow. He also briefly attended Washington University Law School. He subsequently taught at several colleges and universities before working as a sportswriter during the 1980s (much like his character Frank Bascombe). Ford was discharged from the US Marine Corps after contracting hepatitis and he reportedly has a mild case of dyslexia.
To date, Ford is the author of nine novels and five collections of stories as well as a memoir and other works. His body of work has often comparisons to John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Walker Percy among other great writers. He was a Guggenheim fellow, a two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner award, the PEN/Malamud award for fiction, the Library of Congress’s Prize for American Fiction. He is the Mellon Professor and Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Roman Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
I suppose it’s worth mentioning that Ford has gained some minor notoriety for interactions with fellow authors, he once sent novelist Alice Hoffman a copy of one of her books with bullet holes in it after she angered him by unfavorably reviewing The Sportswriter, he lectured Larry McMurtry decades after McMurtry critically reviewed Ford’s first book, and he reportedly spat on fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead in 2004 when encountering him at a party two years after Whitehead published a negative review of Ford’s short story collection A Multitude of Sins in The New York Times. In the review, Whitehead wrote: “Almost every story deals with adultery, invariably in one of two stages: in the final dog days of an affair, or in the aftermath of an affair. The characters are nearly indistinguishable… If I were an epidemiologist, I’d say that some sort of spiritual epidemic has started to afflict white upper-middle-class professionals.” At the party in question, Ford reportedly told Whitehead: “You’re a kid, you should grow up”, and spit in his face. Whitehead then responded with: “I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.” When asked about the incident thirteen years later in 2017, Ford remained unrepentant stating: “as of today, I don’t feel any different about Mr. Whitehead, or his review or my response.” When it first happened, the spitting incident led to accusations of racism against Ford by some members of the literary community. The Guardian wrote: “Rumbling unpleasantly beneath these exchanges is an accusation Ford once levelled at his younger self: that as a Mississippi-born white male writer of a certain vintage, he has had to educate himself out of centuries of racial prejudice.” And while Ford once confessed “I was certainly a little racist as a teenager, even if not a very committed one,” the accusations of racism against an adult Ford did little to affect his career or prestige.
For many years, Ford and his wife Kristina chose to live separately in different parts of the country. But as of 2023, they reportedly sold a home in Maine and relocated to New Orleans, where Kristina was once the director of the local planning commission They have been open about their decision not to have any children.
Film Adaptations:
- None
Further Reading:
The books in the Bascombe series:
- The Sportswriter (1986)
- Independence Day (1995) *Pulitzer Prize Winner
- The Lay of the Land (2006)
- Let Me Be Frank With You (2014) *Pulitzer Prize Finalist
- Be Mine (2023)
Literary Context 1995-1996
- 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature: awarded to Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.”
- 1995 National Book Award Winner: Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth (his second National Book Award after Goodbye, Columbus in 1960)
- 1995 Booker Prize Winner: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1995 was The Rainmaker by John Grisham. Other bestsellers included: The Lost World by Michael Crichton, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, Rose Madder by Stephen King, as well as books by Danielle Steel, and Mary Higgins Clark.
- The first World Book Day was celebrated in 1995.
- The corporation Amazon (initially known as Cadabra) was first incorporated as an online bookstore in 1994-1995.
- A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott was posthumously published.
- John Gardner published GoldenEye, a James Bond continuation novel.
- Several Star Wars Expanded Universe novels were published, such as Kevin J. Anderson’s Darksaber, Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi, and Dave Wolverton’s The Courtship of Princess Leia.
- Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was published.
- Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled was published.
- John le Carré published Our Game.
- Josè Saramago’s Blindness was published.
- Philip Roth published Sabbath’s Theater.
- Salman Rushdie published The Moor’s Last Sigh.
- Moo by Jane Smiley was published.
- The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman was published.
- Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama was published.
- Robert Ludlum’s The Apocalypse Watch was published.
- James A. Michener’s Miracle in Seville was published.
- Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before was published.
Did the Right Book Win?
As I’ve continued along this journey of reading all the Pulitzer Prize winners, I have sometimes doubted my assessment of various novels reviewers and critics of yesteryear once deemed praiseworthy. For example, how did the literary establishment come to regard the sagas of Rabbit Angstrom and Frank Bascombe as emblematic of a deeply important literary movement in American society? Am I missing something here? Opposing opinions are always welcome. Perhaps an academic seminar would be helpful for me, but on the other hand, if you require an academic seminar simply to understand book’s importance doesn’t that blunt its purpose anyway?
At any rate, I did enjoy Independence Day at times, despite it being a dense and lengthy novel filled with various wandering plot threads and speculative musings. I’m still trying to piece together its meaning but Frank Bascombe defenders are always welcome to school me in the comments section below. Despite being a decade or so younger than Frank Bascombe is in Independence Day, I know that I too will be entering my own “Existence Period” in the coming years and perhaps then I will relate to Frank Bascombe more than I do now.
Ford, Richard. Independence Day. Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, New York, 1995 (first vintage contemporary edition, July 1996). Dedicated to “Kristina,” Ford’s wife.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.