Frank Bascombe’s ALS-afflicted 47-year-old son Paul in Be Mine is not autistic, but in his relationship with his father he is tactlessly out of synch, tone-deaf, and entitled. His father rents a camper mid-winter and takes him, caviling and complaining, to see the World’s Only Corn Palace and the stone presidents of Mount Rushmore. Upon arrival in sight of the monument, Paul—who adores the kitsch and curios his father despises—exclaims: “It’s completely pointless and ridiculous, and it’s great.” This confirms the Chekhovian aspirations of Richard Ford’s narrative. As his narrative voice intoned 200 pages earlier, it’s a “non-event that means everything”—both for father and son and for this reader.
With hardly any transition from this high point at Mount Rushmore to the retrospective on his son’s passing, Frank admits that he “can’t say whether my son exhibited extraordinary courage in facing his nemesis, death—intubated, gaunt, ghastly, livid, uncharacteristically afraid, possibly panicked… .” It’s an honest way to conclude the tale. No uplift. It makes me wonder whether the same fate will be “ghastly” for me. What is it that would make it so? The pain? I’ve learned that I can take quite a lot of that. Or that the pain is followed—by nothing. Just a hole in the ground.
I’m both Paul and Frank—Paul for obvious reasons and Frank in my relations with my family. Frank is philosophical about having been cast aside by his wife. He suffers silently the surly condescension of his daughter (“a Log Cabin Republican, what could be worse for a father”) and the painful disconnect with his son who calls him “asshole” and, despite his own helplessness, bristles when his father has to take charge. There is nothing too surprising about this family, nothing incomprehensible. They make sense here and now. I think that I behaved worse with my own father.
I’m actually much luckier with my family. I haven’t been cast aside. My daughter’s know-it-all self-righteousness is patently defensive; and my son is trying to find his way in life without being guided by greed or conformism. They are capable of real generosity. They cannot possibly intend to be cruel—no matter how much pain they inflict.
The refrain of “but it’s not fair!” is for those who don’t understand love. I agree with Badiou that, in addition to the spheres of science, art, and politics, love represents a fourth sphere in which truths—Badiou insists on the plural—manifest themselves. I would add that in the case of love the requisite “truth procedure” is every bit as challenging as a scientific experiment, a hermeneutic decoding of art, or a militant political struggle.
I’m lucky in my family and my undertakings. The truth procedure of love discloses that.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 