Land of the free. . .

One obvious novel to read this weekend is Richard Ford's Independence Day. Nine years after publication of The Sportswriter(1986), Ford took up the story of Frank Bascombe, divorced father of two living children and one dead son.

Having abandoned sports writing – he was never all that keen on sport – Bascombe is now selling real estate. Endeavouring to establish some rapport with his estranged surviving teenage son, Bascombe and the sulky, unwashed youth head off on the holiday weekend, to pay homage at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Their doomed odyssey is hilarious and as moving as Ford, heir to Cheever and Updike, and an acute observer of human nature, can paint it. Here is a Mississippian who as a child of nine met his first great American writer, Eudora Welty, while shopping in Jackson. It is a big, slow-moving novel sustained by a conversational narrative voice shaped by an awareness of his ex-wife's enduring disappointment. The rootless Bascombe, no longer as shell-shocked and now more detached, is an observer who enjoys speculating about the lives people live. It's a novel about America as a land of the confused; it is also a study of modern man, disengaged, self-absorbed, not quite ready to feel. Most of all it draws the reader in and makes an irresistible case on arriving at the closing page to reach for its masterful sequel, The Lay of the Land(2006).