He is a character of some grandeur,intimately surveyed,in terms of family and love and loss,so that we return to him as if to an intimacy foregone or put on hold.Be Mine is about Bascombe tending to the needs of his son,Paul,who has a deadly motor neurone disease,ALS,that impacts everything until nothing is left but a mute feeling of pain.
If this sounds like the worst possible subject matter for a middle-sized novel by an old master,it is not.Be Mine is as realised and impassioned,as full not only of sorrow but of buoyant wit and sparkle,as anything Ford has written:a comprehensive image not simply of life in extremis but of the jokes and wryness,the mutual mockery in the face of love,that this weird father/son conjunction provides.
It is perpetually surprising about an impossibly sad subject matter,but it is done with an extraordinary imaginative spirit and a constantly diverting patter that deepens and does not deflect the extremity it explores so masterfully against all odds.Be Mine is a dazzling tragi-comedy about the reality of human torment that is at the same time sane,debunking,fanciful and full of absent-minded lust and daydream while never for a second losing an intrinsic heartbreaking seriousness.
This is a novel about last things,or nearly last,which is a hoot.Be Mine is laugh-aloud funny for all the soft footfall of the tragic predicament it explores. It is a milestone in American fiction,as far out and imaginative,as full of dread and the hilarity only dread can engender as we can hope for in a major novelist.
AndBe Mine is from its first pages manifestly a major novel as well as a delineation,or so it may seem,of Bascombe,that great American pilgrim into not only hearts of darkness but shade and laughter and the spirit of pilgrimage.