Independence day (novel)

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Independence Day (English original title: Independence Day ) is a novel by the American writer Richard Ford from 1995. The book received both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN / Faulkner Award the following year , making it the first novel to win both prizes . It follows on from Der Sportreporter ( The Sportswriter , 1986) and was in turn continued with Die Lage des Landes ( The Lay of the Land , 2006) and Frank ( Let Me Be Frank With You , 2014).

First-person narrator and protagonist is Frank Bascombe, a real estate agent from New Jersey whom the reader accompanies on the weekend of Independence Day , for which the protagonist has planned an outing with his son. In addition, this weekend Bascombe meets his ex-wife, his girlfriend, his stepbrother, his tenants and a couple of clients looking for a house.

content

It is the weekend before July 4th, 1988, American Independence Day. The United States is dominated by the presidential campaign between Bush and Dukakis . Frank Bascombe, a staunch Democrat , after his brief interlude as a sports reporter, now works as a real estate agent , the most American of all professions, in which the American dream and the pursuit of personal happiness meet the reality of a tight market. Frank's current clients, Joe and Phyllis Markham from Vermont , find themselves constantly torn between wanting a special home and their limited financial resources, and it is unclear whether their young marriage can withstand the hassle of buying a home.

Frank Bascombe still lives in the small town of Haddam, New Jersey , where he sold his old home and bought the house of his divorced wife Ann after she and their children Paul and Clarissa became her second husband, the wealthy architect Charley O'Dell , moved to Deep River , Connecticut . Frank still hasn't got over the breakup with Ann. Various love affairs were short-lived, most recently the one with the black colleague Clair Devane, who was murdered during a viewing appointment. He is currently in a relationship with Sally Caldwell, whose husband Wally disappeared from one day to the other and has since been declared dead. Their relationship suffers from the mutual distance and seems inevitably to be heading for a breakup.

Frank's 15-year-old son Paul was recently caught stealing condoms . He is also in psychiatric treatment for behavioral problems: he repeatedly interrupts himself with high-pitched geeks and barking noises, which may arise from unprocessed grief for the family dog ​​who has had an accident. Frank hopes to get closer to him on a father and son excursion through the halls of fame of American sport. In fact, they get along really well for the first time the night after attending the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield , Massachusetts . But the following day, a momentous accident occurs in Cooperstown , New York , the seat of the Baseball Hall of Fame .

During training in a batting cage , which Paul entered without any protection after an argument with his father, a baseball hits him right in the eye after a sudden step towards the ball machine. In the hustle and bustle that followed, Frank suddenly had Irv Ornstein at his side, his long-lost stepbrother, who happened to be in Cooperstown as well. Irv drives Frank to Oneonta , where Paul is to be operated on for a retinal detachment , and lectures on his newly discovered motto "continuity" during the trip, after his life had been anything but continuous with several marriages and a stay in the kibbutz . After a call to Ann, she takes the reins of action from Frank and has her son flown out to Yale .

Frank drives back to Haddam alone. As a result of the events, the planned meeting with Sally was canceled, but when he called the Algonquin Hotel , she was surprisingly understanding. After Frank surprised himself with a confession of love to Sally on a previous phone call, suddenly a committed relationship, even a second marriage, seems possible for both of them. Paul survived the operation well, and Frank continues to hope that his son will move in with him for the new school year. On July 4th he meets the Markhams again and lets them move into an empty house for rent, worn down after all the failed purchase offers. He visits his old home, which has since been converted into an ecumenical meeting place and has preserved no memory of the past. In the crowd, he followed the Independence Day parade.

background

Richard Ford made the first announcement of a possible successor to his successful novel The Sportswriter in 1989. At that time, the American Independence Day was planned as the framework for action. It took two more years for the plans to take shape when entries in his notebook brought Frank Bascombe's voice back to life. After Ford decided that Bascombe was still living in Haddam, the author, who had moved to New Orleans in 1989, rented a bed and breakfast in Princeton , New Jersey , to do a month's research. Overall, he spent a full year planning the novel and another three years writing it.

Ford set the title Independence Day at the very beginning. Ford likes to sell its books on public holidays - The Sportswriter takes place on Easter , The Lay of the Land on Thanksgiving - to tie in with readers' memories of those events. Since the novel deals a lot with questions of human independence, Independence Day seemed to him the perfect setting. In an interview with Der Spiegel , he explained what he had only realized when he was writing the novel: “Independence is the freedom to leave mistakes behind, to let the past rest and to be able to establish new relationships with the world, the one up to should carry to the end of life. "

Richard Ford hardly had to do any research for Frank Bascombe's new profession as a real estate agent. He himself had moved frequently and bought a few houses that he had made numerous viewing appointments for. For Ford it is part of the American dream that social advancement goes hand in hand with a change of place of residence: “In America that is part of it: You want to go up.” Frank Bascombe's motto “You don't sell a house, you sell a life” also leaves Ford apply to his work as a writer. Contrary to what is often understood, Frank Bascombe's life is not a typical life: "In life, such a man would be completely inconspicuous, it is up to the writer to intensify it."

reception

Independence Day received rave reviews upon its release. The book has been called "the definitive novel of the post-war generation", Frank Bascombe "one of the most complex and memorable characters of our time" and Richard Ford "one of the outstanding curators of the great museum of American life". The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN / Faulkner Award in 1996 . This made it the first novel to win these two major American literary prizes.

For Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times , Independencen Day was a worthy successor to The Sportswriter , who cemented Ford's reputation as "one of the most eloquent voices of his generation." In his portrait of a medieval middle-class life, he conjures up an image of America in the 1980s that is reminiscent of John Updike's Rabbit at Rest . It is true that the novel is constructed schematically, for example in that the title and reading Emerson emphasizes the hero 's search for independence, while his fears and sensitivities are illustrated by an arsenal of secondary characters with a high recognition value. But the reading turns out to be “as captivating as it is moving” and draws not only a finely nuanced picture of the state of mind of its protagonist, but a portrait of an entire class of society that, like Frank Bascombe, is surprised by change and experiences loss, fear and disappointment.

Paul Ingendaay sees Independence Day , which "in its opulent widescreen format contains many motifs from American everyday life", as a candidate for the Great American Novel . A “ten-hour Eric Rohmer à l'américaine ” emerges in a separate form “between a road novel and a novel of consciousness” , in which the same question is ultimately asked: “How do you lead a successful life? And why does it still go wrong? ”The philosophy of the novel is based on the belief that geographical mobility entails existential mobility, that is, life can be improved by changing location. This thought is played out in the two metaphors “car trip” and “house purchase”, the latter having the same meaning for Ingendaay as the occupation of the title character in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman : “It creates the frame of reference in which the essential existential questions of all Americans are dealt with to let".

Independence Day also proved to be a bestseller among American audiences. A year after publication, 330,000 copies had already been sold. Part of the success was due to a misunderstanding among the buyers, who believed they had to do with the book of the 1996 hit film of the same name by Roland Emmerich . Richard Ford took the confusion with humor and emphasized that there have been no returns. He saw his novel, rooted in everyday American life, as an “antidote” to the patriotic science fiction thriller.

expenditure

  • Richard Ford: Independence Day . AA Knopf, New York 1995, ISBN 0-679-49265-8 .
  • Richard Ford: Independence Day . From the American by Fredeke Arnim. Berlin, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8270-0061-0 .
  • Richard Ford: Independence Day . From the American by Fredeke Arnim. Goldmann, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-442-43435-1 .
  • Richard Ford: Independence Day . From the American by Brigitte Walitzek. dtv, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-423-14442-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Don Lee: About Richard Ford: A Profile . In: Plowshares , Issue 70, Fall 1996.
  2. ^ Bonnie Lyons: Richard Ford, The Art of Fiction No. 147 . In: The Paris Review No. 140, case 1996.
  3. ↑ a b "You sell a life" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 42 , 1995, pp. 252 ( online ).
  4. ↑ "the definitive novel of the postwar generation", "one of the most complex and memorable characters of our time" "one of the finest curators of the great American living museum". Quoted from: Bonnie Lyons: Richard Ford, The Art of Fiction No. 147 . In: The Paris Review No. 140, case 1996.
  5. ↑ 1996 Pulitzer Prizes at the Pulitzer Prize .
  6. ↑ Past Winners & Finalists at the PEN / Faulkner Award .
  7. ↑ “galvanized his reputation as one of his generation's most eloquent voices”, “as gripping as it is affecting”. Quotes from: Michiko Kakutani : Books of the Times: Afloat in the Turbulence Of the American Dream . In: The New York Times, June 13, 1995.
  8. ↑ Paul Ingendaay : The flags also fly for the fearful rabbit . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 10, 1995.
  9. ↑ "Antidote to Film" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1996, pp. 242 ( online ).