CONTEMPT FOR THE BOURGEOIS

CONTEMPT FOR THE BOURGEOIS. When I was first retired, I asked a friend who had been retired—and therefore reading—for several years to recommend one book. He very enthusiastically said, “THE SPORTSWRITER. Read THE SPORTSWRITER.” I loved THE SPORTSWRITER. Richard Ford’s title character in THE SPORTSWRITER, Frank Bascombe, became a real estate agent in the sequel INDEPENDENCE DAY and evidently remains a real estate agent in the third volume of what is now a trilogy, THE LAY OF THE LAND. Real estate agents appear seldom in literature and when they do appear, they are usually scorned, as Babbitt is. However, I was unprepared for this sentence in a review by Joseph O’Neill in the current ATLANTIC (December 2006): “And it’s in this way that one eventually comes to question the very basics of Frank Bascombe: how it could be (in a novel steeped in psychological actuality) that a chronically rarefied, left-leaning, discriminating person such as he might in all seriousness and for decades and without self-acknowledged anguish and self-medication elect the dumbed-down gratifications offered by a realty job, corny leisure activities, and a circle of dimwitted and/or Republican friends and neighbors who don’t bat an eye whenever he comes out with one of his gnomic pronouncements.” (page 134). Babbitt got off easy.