Independence Day

Richard Ford (Harvill $22.95)

"MY NAME is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter." With that laconic first paragraph Richard Ford introduced us to a novel which is a harrowing mixture of first-person off-handedness and exactness, the story of a man's attempts to maintain himself in the aftermath of the death of his first born son and his divorce.

The Sportswriter, the quintessential story of a life of quiet desperation, was published in 1986: a decade later, Independence Day revisits Frank Bascombe.

According to Ford, he had no intention to write a sequel. He says in an interview that he unwittingly started to fill a notebook with "phrases that sounded as if they came from Frank, they had his accent". Independence Day does not share, however, the laconic, pared-down feel of The Sportswriter: its rhythms are more expansive, its sentences longer, its lyricism more pronounced.

But it retains the first novel's distinctive tone of voice, its ability to convey with wonderful precision Frank Bascombe's clear-eyed hapless account of himself, his combination of self-knowledge and willing self-delusion.

The book begins five years after The Sportswriter ended. The changes in Frank Bascombe are not startling, but they are significant. He is no longer a sportswriter: he sells real estate. He still lives in Haddam, New Jersey, in his ex-wife's house. She has remarried and left town with their two children. He is pursuing a new relationship and has made some entrepreneurial decisions.

Independence Day revolves around an expedition on the Fourth of July weekend, a journey taken by Frank and his second son Paul, now 15, who is going through a troubled phase and has had a run-in with the police.

The plan is, Frank explains, that "bright and early tomorrow I am picking him up all the way in Connecticut and staging for both our benefits a split-the-breeze father-and-son driving campaign in which we will visit as many sports halls of fame as humanly possible in one forty-eight-hour period (this being only two), wind up in storied Cooperstown where we'll stay at the venerable Deerslayer Inn, fish on scenic Lake Otsego, shoot off safe and ethical fireworks, eat like castaways, and somehow along the way I'll work (I hope) the miracle only a father can work." The reality is somewhat different. The journey - with its mythic American resonances evoked with a mixture of sardonic humor, tenderness and solemnity - takes unexpected detours.

Ford's touch is sure but never forced. He understands the illumination that comes from detail: he knows how to use the texture of working life to explore deeper assumptions.

Just as sportswriting allowed him to examine notions of heroism, masculinity and achievement, so the world of real estate gives him the opportunity to meditate on the small decisions considered crucial in people's lives, the way in which an individual's attempt to choose where to live reflects the greater desire to choose [ital] how[ital] to live.

One of the strands of Independence Day's narrative concerns Frank's dedication to the task of finding a house for Joe and Phyllis Markham, a tormented couple who could have stepped out of their own Raymond Carver short story.

At the heart of novel is the distinction between loneliness and solitude. In examining its ramifications, Ford maintains a remarkable balance between opposite tendencies: between bluntness and delicacy, illusion and acceptance, bleakness and tenderness, hope and resignation. He can be both funny and despairing, he writes about sentiment without sentimentality. What emerges at the conclusion of Independence Day is an affirmation of optimism in spite of all evidence to the contrary, a willingness to admit that despite everything, life still has possibilities.

Eat Me

Linda Jaivin (Text Publishing $14.95)

THE first chapter sets the tone: a woman shopping in a supermarket late at night explores the sensual pleasures of the fruit and vegetable section in a way that captures the undivided attention of a security officer and gives the concept of self-service a whole new connotation.

Eat Me seems at first to be a kind of Darlinghurst Decameron crossed with a (designer) bodice-ripper in which four women friends - Julia, a photographer, Chantal, a magazine editor, Helen, a feminist academic, and Philippa, an aspiring novelist - meet to share drinks and gossip and swap dreams and desires. Each chapter tells a new tale. Gradually, the plot thickens as the erotic adventures and misadventures start to accumulate.

Just who is writing this book, and who are its characters? Are they telling us their stories, their fantasies, or someone else's stories? Linda Jaivin creates a narrative about narratives, a juicy, over-ripe tale of brief encounters, melting moments, soft and hard centres and forbidden fruits, served up with a sprinkling of one-liners.

Philippa Hawker