Over the next twenty years, Ford revisited Bascombe in two more novels: Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006). With Independence Day, Frank is aged in his forties and now a real estate agent. In The Lay of the Land, he is still a realtor, but now he is living by the New Jersey shore and aged in his fifties. These three novels – the first and second masterpieces, the third marred by its unwieldy length – became known as the Bascombe trilogy. As a set, they offered fascinating insight into the daily lives of the middle classes of the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They were also hugely entertaining reads.

The Bascombe trilogy took Ford out of the pigeonhole of the so-called school of dirty realism – a tag first applied by Granta editor Bill Bulford. In 1983, Bulford dedicated an edition of Granta to a clutch of ‘dirty realist’ writers who shared the late Raymond Carver’s concern for the lives of people living on the margins of the American dream. Carver wrote about those American losers with prose of startling brevity and intensity. So, too, does Ford.

Bascombe, though, was not living a life of quiet desperation in a trailer park. Nor was he on the run in Canada. Charming, loquacious, glib, he was unapologetically in pursuit of that most American notion – happiness. The first-person voice Ford found with the Bascombe novels is unlike his other works. It’s realism, but not dirty. More like slightly soiled.

‘The Bascombe trilogy took Ford out of the pigeonhole of the so-called school of dirty realism’

I thought, with The Lay of the Land, I had seen the last of Bascombe. I was wrong. Bascombe is back in Let Me Be Frank With You, a collection of four scenes from the life of the now sixty-eight-year-old retired realtor. Bascombe is living in Haddam in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In the first story he visits the devastated New Jersey shore where he once lived. In the second he is visited by Ms Pines, an African American woman who tells him the terrible history of his home in Haddam. In the third, he visits Ann, the former wife only referred to as ‘X’ in The Sportswriter. In the fourth, Frank hears a deathbed confession from an ‘old friend’ who is not really a friend.

Along the way, Bascombe offers asides such as these on human nature (‘Our true emotions are never conventional’); on ageing (‘I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery’); and on himself: ‘A man who doesn’t lie (or rarely), who presumes nothing from the past, who takes the high, optimistic road (when available), who doesn’t envision the future, who streamlines his utterances (no embellishments), and in all instances acts nice.’

Bascombe’s wife Sally is out of frame for much of the book, but makes a defining contribution. She interrupts Frank while he is eating his All-Bran to tell him about a book she was reading on the Dakota uprising of 1862, where the US cavalry put down a Sioux revolt, then staged the mass execution of sixty-eight native American warriors. Sally tells Frank that, as they were standing together on the gallows, waiting to be simultaneously hung, the Sioux warriors called out together, ‘I’m here!’

‘Then they hanged them. All of them. At one moment. “I’m here.” As if that made it all right for them. Made death tolerable and less awful. It gave them strength.’ Sally shook her head … ‘I just thought you’d want to know that. I’m sorry to ruin your breakfast.’
‘I’m glad to know about it, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘It didn’t ruin my breakfast at all.’
‘I’m here,’ she said and seemed to embarrass herself.
‘So am I,’ I said.

The power of the Bascombe books is in their accumulation of moments like these: everyday interactions between ordinary people. Let Me Be Frank With You is a welcome addition to the stable of Bascombe books; an antidote, in its artful brevity, to its overwritten predecessor The Lay of the Land.

Like The Sportswriter, Let Me Be Frank With You is fixated on mortality. Bascombe is a man living lightly, stripping down the ‘accumulations’ of life, and still saying, ‘I am here.’ It is a book, as Frank would put it, brimming with the ‘ambiguous stuff of complex literature’.