Books

Frank Bascombe has lived through the death of a son, a divorce and an abandonment, two careers, and a battle with prostate cancer. Raised in Mississippi, educated at the University of Michigan, based in New Jersey, he's lived a life full of reflection, observation and prickly optimism.

Pat Wallenbach / AP

Award-winning novelist Richard Ford says he did his best by fictional character Frank Bascombe and has no regrets about the trilogy's end.

And now his creator, the Pulitzer-winning novelist Richard Ford, is wishing him goodbye and good luck.

"It's sad," says Mr. Ford, who will read from the final piece of his Bascombe trilogy, The Lay of the Land, Friday night at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of the Arts & Letters Live Distinguished Writers Series. "But I think these are good books, and I've done my very best at them. If I had some sense that they weren't good books, that the best was yet to come about this character, then I might have a sense of unease about it. But I don't."

Mr. Ford, 63, will continue to write, but few contemporary novelists are so closely associated with one character. Over two decades, Frank has become Mr. Ford's version of John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, a man for all seasons of life.

In The Sportswriter (1986), he's 38 and recently divorced. Independence Day (1995) finds Frank taking his troubled teen son, Paul, on a July Fourth weekend tour of the major sports halls of fame. The Lay of the Land finds Frank planning a fractured family Thanksgiving meal. He's in the autumn of his years, an arsenal of titanium BBs encased in his sickened prostate. Winter, and mortality, are coming into view.

In Independence Day, the novel that won Mr. Ford both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Frank coasted along in what he called his "existence period." Now, as he catches a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, he has embarked on his "permanent period."

"The permanent period is that period in life when most of your lived life is behind you and you're on the short end of the branch," he explains from his New York apartment (he also lives in Maine and New Orleans). "You've made most of the mistakes that you're going to make in life, and you ... have a certain freedom of behavior because you're probably not going to screw your life up. It's an opportunity to live your life pretty much as you want to and to realize that it's this period of your life you will most likely be remembered for when you're gone."

But Frank's permanence has loose ends. His second wife, Sally, has left him to be with her first husband, who reappeared years after being presumed dead. His adult son is an anti-social ball of quirk. And though he thinks he has come to terms with the long-ago death of his first child, we can tell he hasn't.

Mr. Ford renders Frank's seemingly ordinary life in unassumingly poetic internal monologue and detailed observations of his Northeastern surroundings. The language locates beauty and epiphany in the everyday, from Frank's negotiations with his scattered clan to his duties as a real-estate agent.

Frank started out as a novelist, then moved on to writing for a glossy sports magazine before landing in realty. But neither he nor his creator see his journey as a downward trajectory. Indeed, realty is Frank's calling. Something to do with ... permanence.

"Real estate and where we elect to live – our domiciles and domiciliary decisions – stand for us as one of the most permanent things that we do," Mr. Ford says. "To shelter people, to provide that sense of permanence in their lives, as Frank says in Independence Day, is one of the most important things you can do for someone. He is literally an agent of being able to do that."

Part of Frank's comfort in existence, and then permanence, lies in his reluctance to address the past. A realist haunted by his son's death, he finds solace in the present and the future.

"In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing," Frank muses in The Sportswriter. "I know I'm always heartsick in novels (sometimes I skip these parts altogether; sometimes I close the book and never pick it up again) when the novelist makes his clanking, obligatory trip into the Davy Jones locker of the past."

So he holds his history and heartsickness at bay – or at least tries to. In The Lay of the Land, Frank's past barges on in when he least expects it.

Or, as Mr. Ford puts it, "he doesn't like thinking about the past, but he does think about the past."

The natural question arises: How much of Frank Bascombe is Richard Ford? Frank was reared in Biloxi, Mr. Ford in Jackson. Frank went to the University of Michigan, Mr. Ford to Michigan State. Frank lost a young child; Mr. Ford was a teen when his dad died. Frank was a novelist who turned to sports writing; Mr. Ford wrote for the long-defunct Inside Sports before finding success as a novelist.

You get the feeling Frank would politely shun such questions. Appropriately, so does Mr. Ford. "When people ask me how are you like Frank and how are you different from Frank, I say Frank is a much nicer person than I am. They're sophisticated enough books that the readership is sophisticated enough not to think that Frank is me and I'm Frank."

The big difference between the two is clear enough. As of The Lay of the Land, Frank will appear no longer. He's not permanent.

His creator, on the other hand, is alive, well, still writing, and ready to read in Dallas.