Independence Day

"That’s right. This is as far from ecstatic as you can get. This is a much more middle-aged road trip than On the Road . It’s the second of the Frank Bascombe series of books. The premise of the first— The Sportswriter — is that their kid has died and they are struggling to come to terms with the aftermath. Now, the guy who had been a writer in Independence Day has decided to give up writing and is going to get into real estate. Real estate turns out to be existentially interesting to him, because where you make your home is a question that everyone faces. He’s setting out to visit his ex-wife, and to take their son on a trip to the various sporting Halls of Fame that are available to them. The reason I really love the Bascombe novels, and this may be the most perfect example, is that Ford manages to make the minute-by-minute passage of time interesting. His characters aren’t always doing incredibly interesting things, but the context is so rich in their layered reminiscences and sense of what the stakes are, that you can just spend hours with him as he goes about his relatively boring road trip. I think that’s an amazing achievement. My cheesy analogy is that a lot of novels seem to play with Monopoly money, in which case you have to buy more and more hotels and have more and more extravagant action for anything to seem to matter. But as soon as you can convince readers that you’re playing with real money, suddenly low-stakes bets feel very important."