Independence Day
by Richard Ford
Summary
Frank Bascombe used to write about sports. Now he sells houses in Haddam, New Jersey, and it is the Fourth of July weekend, 1988. He is divorced, has a girlfriend he cannot commit to, owns a hot dog stand and two rental properties, and is showing a pair of impossible clients their forty fifth house.
He calls the stage he is in the Existence Period: a deliberate lowering of expectation designed to keep him from being hurt, which he presents to the reader as wisdom and which the novel steadily exposes as evasion.
The weekend's real business is his fifteen year old son Paul, who is in Connecticut with his mother, has been arrested for shoplifting condoms and assaulting a security guard, barks like a dog, and is not managing the death of his brother. Frank takes him to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame, on the theory that fathers and sons and sport will supply what he cannot say directly, and at a batting cage in Cooperstown the trip goes badly wrong.
The clients are the running joke and the running argument. The Markhams have sold up in Montclair, want a house in a town they cannot afford, and refuse every compromise while their savings shrink, and Frank keeps driving them around because selling people a place to live turns out to be the closest thing he has to a vocation.
Almost nothing happens across four hundred and fifty pages. It is all voice: Frank noticing, qualifying, digressing about real estate and independence and America, being funny and companionable and slightly unbearable, often in the same paragraph.
You can start here without having read The Sportswriter. Best for readers who read for sentences and company rather than plot, and who like a narrator they are invited to see through.
Historical Context & Significance
Independence Day won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN Faulkner Award, and it was the first novel to take both in the same year.
It is the second of Richard Ford's Bascombe books, following The Sportswriter in 1986 and followed by The Lay of the Land, the linked stories of Let Me Be Frank With You and, in 2023, Be Mine, which covers roughly forty years of one ordinary man's interior life.
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and is usually filed with the dirty realists alongside Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, a label the Bascombe books do not fit at all. He has said he set the series in New Jersey precisely to avoid being read as a Southern writer.