Richard Ford’s final Frank Bascombe book completes a social history of the boomer generation from midlife to end times
n 1986, Richard Ford took an Alice Hoffman novel out into his back yard and shot it. Hoffman had had the temerity to give Ford’s third novel, The Sportswriter, a middling review in the New York Times. Ford at the time believed The Sportswriter to be his masterpiece. It tells the story of Frank Bascombe, once an author of short stories,