Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book - Hardcover

Frank is Ford's Everyman, a disenchanted, rueful and humorous witness to his country's faltering resolve at the close of the American century and the opening of a new and newly menacing millennium . Late style, in Ford, is loose-limbed, allusive, jokey in a rueful way, and mutedly elegiac . The delicacy with which Frank passes over the sad awkwardness of the moments shows just what a marvellous writer Ford is (John Banville, Guardian)

The overarching theme of all Ford's novels has been the gap between the fixed characters we construct for ourselves and present to the world and the unfixed, uncalculable selves that actually govern our actions . As ever, the droll, lyrical punch of Frank's voice provides a great part of the appeal. Latinate words jostle with slang and profanity. Mock-heroic Southern verbosity sits alongside insightful cultural analysis. By nature solitary ('friendship is over-rated'), Frank is in fact great company, and his deadpan wit and existential search for the right action and ultimate truths make him, for all his flaws, intensely likeable . Although Frank insists to us once more that his literary talents are measly, reading his hilarious, ever-inventive narration, we are bound to disagree (Tancred Newbury, Literary Review)

The enjoyment of reading Richard Ford is not about decommissioning, it is about the exquisite pleasure of acquisition of language (larruping, galunker, copacetic) . As you read Richard Ford, the harder you look, the sadder and funnier it gets. And by the way, in case you did not know, copacetic means excellent which is what this book is (Observer)

Frank's subtle take on modern times, his resigned attitude to aging, acceptance of the way things have panned out and enjoyment of life's minor daily compensations are profoundly moving and often very funny, too. Another seemingly effortless Ford masterpiece (Daily Mail)

Ford uses direct, but aphoristic and rhythmic prose - sentences often long and sinuous - to describe the world around Bascombe and his in-terror emotional state . It's a true delight to hear Bascombe's voice again, his acute, if sometimes unpalatable, observations; his oddly homespun vocabulary . This is a work of understated power, intelligence and not a little mischief, but one that leaves one wanting - craving - more (Independent)

Let Me Be Frank With You is a beautifully composed, deceptively ramshackle, novel. Ford is renowned for taking his trusty sidearm and blasting away at bad reviews. Few potshots will be required for this one. Roll on number five - after all, Richard Ford's only 70 and ¾ (John Sutherland, The Times)

Richard Ford had announced that he would not write any more Frank Bascombe, protagonist of The Sportswriter and two further novels, and possibly the most admired Everyman of the late-20th-century US fiction. But some heroes are too good to abandon for ever (as Conan Doyle and others found), and now Bascombe is back, to the probable pleasure of all who enjoy his chewy observational style (Guardian)

The incomparable Mississippian Richard Ford is a great writer, no question about that. More importantly, he is a great American writer. Throughout his novels and short stories, as well as his astute critical reading of literature, he has fulfilled the main objective of art: the exploration of the self. He has also consistently chiselled away, ever closer to the heart of the United States . He is a writer who has nailed exactly what it is to be alive - no mean feat - and to be alive in the US (Eileen Battersby, Irish Times)

His journalistic eye for the revealing detail, his knack for tracing the connections between the public and the personal, his gift for capturing the precariousness of daily life (The Times)

The appeal of the Bascombe books is both simple and elusive. They are written in a fresh, graceful accessible voice - apparently that of an American everyman offering full disclosure and homespun wisdom, with all the literary chicanery stripped way. Upon close inspection, however, Frank is revealed as mercurial, fairly evasive and anything but typical: an existentialist renegade taking refuge in the persona of an ordinary suburban guy . Ford provides a bravura account of the hurricane's devastation, in the supple, thickly detailed Bascombe prose, shifting effortlessly from lyrical to vulgar in a sentence (Sunday Times)