After the trilogy (and the hurricane): the likeable return of Frank Bascombe

The story of Frank Bascombe, a sports-writer turned estate agent but always a New Jersey homebody, has already taken Richard Ford nearly 30 years and three volumes to tell, totalling 1,300 pages — longer than War and Peace. But for Frank, aged 68 (and for Ford, aged 70), it’s not over. In the autumn of 2012, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the New Jersey shoreline. And though Bascombe is retired from real estate and living safely inland in Haddam (the town where his first-person chronicles began, in 1986, with The Sportswriter) he is not unaffected by the devastation. In the four long stories that comprise this fourth Bascombe volume, he learns that his former beach house has been destroyed. A woman made homeless by Sandy has retreated to Haddam and shows up at Frank’s door. Frank’s second wife Sally, a grief counsellor, tends the storm’s elderly victims, and is needed more than ever — because it’s Christmas.