Be Mine
By Richard Ford
Bloomsbury £18.99
‘When you're young, your opponent is the future. But when you're not young, your opponent's the past.’
Frank Bascombe came up with that fretful axiom in Independence Day (1995), the second of Richard Ford's novels featuring Frank as narrator and, perhaps, alter ego.
Middle-aged and thus with no opponent to speak of, back then Frank imagined that when he reached his seventies, he'd be in diapers.
In , he's
