“Le Paradis des fous” (Be Mine), by Richard Ford, translated from English (United States) by Josée Kamoun, L’Olivier, 384 p., €24, digital €17 (in bookstores on September 20).
All the books in the “Frank Bascombe” cycle, which Richard Ford has been constructing for almost forty years, follow roughly the same pattern. On the occasion of a celebration (Easter, Thanksgiving, etc.), his hero takes to the road and makes a “situation” (title of the third volume, L’Olivier, 2008) provisional account of his life and, incidentally, of the United States. The first time, for A weekend in Michigan (Payot, 1990; reissued by L’Olivier, 1999), Frank was approaching forty, had just lost his 9-year-old son and had been abandoned by his wife. Then we saw him grow older, go through new mournings, experience new loves and new break-ups, change cars, jobs… And always observe the world with his skepticism not devoid of faith in humanity, display his humor and his grumpy kindness.
In Fool’s ParadiseIt’s February 2020, Frank is 75 years old and the next holiday is Valentine’s Day. It is with his second son, Paul, that he will go on a trip. As a “new version” ofIndependence (Olivier, 1996, Pulitzer Prize winner, undoubtedly the best of Bascombe’s novels): At the time, Paul was a troubled teenager and, before taking him to juvenile court, Frank had wanted to show him, in particular, the higher places of life. baseball.
In 2020, Paul is 47 years old and has recently been diagnosed with Charcot disease, which condemns him to a short-term death. In the United States, this neurodegenerative pathology is widely known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”, named after a baseball player who died from it in 1941. It is difficult not to see a form of tragic mockery on the part of Richard Ford in choosing to adorn his character with it; in a way, Paul no longer has to visit monuments in memory of sportsmen, it is as if he were. An example of the black humor that infuses Fool’s Paradise and accompanies the two men on their journey “semi-epic” Three days to Mount Rushmore (South Dakota), that immense sculpture dedicated to the glory of the great American presidents.
There are no great outpourings
Because, as surprising as it may seem, it is from these premises that Richard Ford, 80, has composed a comedy, painful and crepuscular, certainly, but a comedy. The author seems to think that not even a terrible diagnosis can change men: throughout the journey, the dialogue between father and son will remain as “coded and elliptical” which it always has been; there will be no great outbursts between them, but there will be many jokes of varying quality, including some about politics, less present than in the previous volumes. There will also be numerous concrete testimonies of Frank’s consideration for his sick son, which will illustrate what the first one said in in all honesty (L’Olivier, 2015): “What is love but an infinite series of isolated gestures?”
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