This is the longest book I’ve read in a while and finishing it felt like an accomplishment. Ford is a good writer of prose and he creates a memorable, if unlikeable, character in Frank Bascome.
Frank is having a mid-life crisis at age 38 going on 39. He lost his father when he was 14 and more recently, his 14 year old son dies of Rey’s syndrome. Frank has one published novel that was optioned for a movie that is never made. He has another unfinished novel in a bedside drawer but has turned to sportswriting. He travels a lot and this gives him ample opportunities to cheat on his wife. She looks the other way until she finds letters between him and a woman he actually did not sleep with. The letters show a happier, more easy-going man than the husband he is around the house. That is the betrayal she cannot forgive and she divorces him.
I stuck with it because the back cover of the book promises that “Bascome will end up losing the remains of his familiar life, though with spirits soaring.” I did not feel the same way about the ending and I don’t think I will read the other two books in the trilogy.