Let Me Be Frank With You

“Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, continues to reflect on the meaning of existence in these four absorbing, funny, and often profound novellas.” — Publishers Weekly

“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.” — Huffington Post, Best Books for Fall 2014

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

“Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, continues to reflect on the meaning of existence in these four absorbing, funny, and often profound novellas…Readers who met Frank in Ford’s earlier novels will quickly reconnect with his indelible personality.” — Publishers Weekly

“… caustically 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 (starred review)

“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

“In his Frank Bascombe novels–The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land–Richard Ford bares the male psyche at various ages. Bascombe is retired now, and let’s just say: Life’s leading to one inevitable place. As ever, his ruminations offer insight.” — AARP, Editor’s Picks

“Deeply elegiac tales… A notable addition–and perhaps coda–to Ford’s ‘Frank Bascombe’ trilogy; highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“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

“Bascombe himself is still alive at the end of Let Me Be Frank With You. If he and we can defer the call of mortality, we can only hope to meet him again in 10 years’ time.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“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..”Grade: B+ — Entertainment Weekly

“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

“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

“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

“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.” — Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

“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

“Though his wit tends toward the acerbic, there’s an undercurrent of gratitude for everything that’s come to him… Anyone who’s followed that life since it first appeared on the page can only feel a similar gratitude to Ford for having created it.” — BookPage

“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

“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

“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

“Frank is pushing 70 but he remains a fascinating emblem of his times… I admire Ford for bringing back Frank Bascombe as an old man and for creating a form and compressing a style to represent one late sexagenarian’s circumstances and consciousness without succumbing to geezer sentimentality or contrived serenity.” — Daily Beast

“Despite the sober subject matter, Frank is as bitingly funny as ever. His choice observations and the stories he tells reveal a man whose limitations and failings coexist with soaring attempts to make sense of a world undone by fate.” — Shelf Awareness

“[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 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

“Frank Bascombe, who made his first appearance in “The Sportswriter” in 1986, returns in his fourth novel, and there are abundant reasons to be grateful.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“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

“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

“[Frank Bascombe is] as ruminative as ever