Word: forde
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American readers love lonely guys, with their emotional weightlessness and tender detachments. Given such an edge, Richard Ford should have little trouble becoming a literary heartthrob. Author of two earlier novels, A Piece of My Heart and The Ultimate Good Luck, he has already demonstrated his storytelling abilities and technical skills. He has also cultivated an engaging narrative voice, one of those down-home deliveries that can sound like Huck Finn with a college education...
Twenty years ago, Frank Bascombe, hero of Ford's new novel, probably would have been a college English instructor with a stalled novel, a broken marriage and a string of women who leave him anesthetized and wistful. That was when the literary man was something of a culture hero. Bascombe has given up on that idea, although he retains some of the baggage: he has an abandoned novel titled Tangier, an ex-wife whom he calls X, and Vicki, a good ole girl from Texas who is a nurse and an effective pain killer. To earn a living, he covers...
...lost his will to write novels is always in danger of trying the reader's patience. His repeated assertions that uncertainty is the only certainty are a bit modish, as is his belief that literature is not in the enlightening business, but should aim to create "disturbances." Nevertheless, Ford accomplishes the first requirement of fiction: the making of a convincing illusion. Frank Bascombe inhabits an all too believable dreamworld. --By R.Z. Sheppard
...hear him tell it, Chrysler Chairman Lee lacocca, 61, wants to run for President about as much as he wants to be seen driving a Ford. "I have no intention at all of entering the funny world of politics," he told reporters in Washington last week. "I don't want to have a mid-career change and bring on a mid-life crisis...
...Aleksei Kosygin in June 1967. That encounter too was organized on short notice, without a prearranged outcome and with only a few advisers on each side. Johnson relied most heavily on his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, later head of the World Bank and currently a director of the Ford Foundation. The following exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming book, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (Pantheon Books; $14.95), recounts that fateful meeting and its consequences...