Beginning with THE LAY OF THE LAND in 2006 and then LET ME BE FRANK WITH YOU eight years later, it seemed that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford (INDEPENDENCE DAY) had brought the saga of writer turned real estate agent Frank Bascombe to a fitting end. But readers enchanted by the combination of Frank’s mordant wit and keen observational eye that accompanied them across nearly three decades of American life will be pleased to know that he has returned for a final (perhaps) chapter in his character’s story.

The year is 2020, and 74-year old Frank finds himself spending the days leading up to Valentine’s Day in frigid, snowy Rochester, Minnesota, with his son, Paul. The pair are wrapping up a two-month stay there so that Paul, who suffers from ALS (or “Al’s” as he calls it), could participate in a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic. Sadly, this isn’t a trial that holds much prospect for a cure, or even remission. His neurodegenerative disease is the “fast-acting kind,” as his growing symptoms reveal, and was diagnosed late.

"One of the qualities that has made Frank Bascombe such an appealing character over five books has been his aphoristic wit. BE MINE is dense with his brand of observational wisdom and humor."

This bleak setting provides the stage for Frank and his 47-year-old son, both of them richly possessing a taste for irony and a fondness for word play, to act out their parts in a tragicomic mortality role reversal. Frank, who has had his own encounter with prostate cancer, realizes that they are “not congruent, though they sometimes seem to be.” In his father’s eyes, Paul, once employed to write “dopey greeting cards” at Hallmark and in “human logistics” (i.e., working in security at a theological seminary), “has merely lived the somehow life I and others live, and seemed okay about it until his illness.”

Father and son spar like a pair of aging vaudevillians acting out well-worn routines. Frank frets about the quality of his caregiving. However, from all the evidence, he’s doing a more than adequate job under the circumstances. And though Paul is noticeably lacking in self-pity (Frank calls him the “best-adjusted desperately sick person imaginable”), his bitterness often surfaces in sarcasm --- like insisting on calling his father “Lawrence,” as in “Lawrence Nightingale.”

To mark the conclusion of Paul’s treatment, Frank has planned a three-day, 600-mile journey to Mount Rushmore, with a stop at a spectacular exemplar of American kitsch --- the World’s Only Corn Palace, overflowing with “corn-themed crapola,” in Mitchell, South Dakota. To get there, they rent an aging RV called the Windbreaker from a business known as A Fool’s Paradise. Its co-owner, Krista, sends them on their way expressing her belief that “something good’s going to happen on this trip” and “to be sure you and Paul take a chance and do things you thought you’d never do.”

As has been true for most of their lives, the journey to the iconic monument in the company of these two prickly and deeply self-aware characters turns out to be less than epic, but it’s no less revealing or pleasurable for that fact. This is life, with its sorrows and joys, its fleeting moments of happiness and despair, its episodes of excitement and more frequent interludes of boredom. Widening his lens, Ford is fond of chronicling the touchstones of American life --- among them, the parade of cookie-cutter retail commerce that accompanies anyone on a trip across the United States. His description of Rapid City, South Dakota, as a “soul-less splat of mini-malls, tower cranes, franchise eats, car purveyors and new banks,” shouldn’t be taken personally by the residents of that city.

One of the qualities that has made Frank Bascombe such an appealing character over five books has been his aphoristic wit. BE MINE is dense with his brand of observational wisdom and humor. “I’d never completely ‘found myself’ --- except in the mirror each morning,” he admits, with his wry modesty. “Choice usually isn’t choice, only what you’re left with,” he observes, reflecting on the planned trip. And in commenting on how Paul is dealing with his illness, he notes: “The fact that things end may be the most interesting quality about them; but it’s different if it’s you that’s ending. Though, as in all things, I could easily be wrong.”

Save for an epilogue entitled “Happiness” that bookends an identically titled prologue, the Bascombes’ odyssey ends after 20 minutes in the Mount Rushmore parking lot. Frank observes of the four presidents’ carvings, “Something’s decidedly measly about them, something ballyhooed which they’re not up to,” even as Paul’s enthusiasm for the monument makes him “happy to have done one seemingly right thing for one seemingly not wrong reason.” It’s the conclusion of the pair’s unsentimental reckoning with the end of life --- whether it comes after one’s biblical allotment or prematurely --- and it’s one that takes place on the verge of the arrival of a deadly virus that will force Americans to come unexpectedly and unwillingly to a similar reckoning.

Having previously twice incorrectly predicted the end of Frank Bascombe’s story, there’s a good chance for this writer that the third time’s the charm. But he’s such an engaging traveling companion that it would be fine if his story continued like a baseball game stretching on through one extra inning after another on a pleasant summer afternoon with the prospect that it might never end --- even as we know, inevitably, that it must.