RETURN OF THE SPORTSWRITER

By Paul Gray

It is aesthetically naive but perfectly natural to wonder what happens to characters after the books in which they appear have ended. In fact, the better the book, the greater the illusion that its interesting people have been leading autonomous lives and are still, somewhere, doing more of the same. Most readers felt that way about Richard Ford's highly acclaimed novel The Sportswriter (1986), which left its narrator-hero Frank Bascombe in an emotional limbo after a hectic Easter weekend spent trying to accommodate the demands of his job and a new girlfriend. For all his attempts to get on with life, Frank still mourned the death-from Reye's syndrome-of his eldest child Ralph several years earlier, and the divorce from his wife that soon followed.

Independence Day (Knopf; 451 pages; $24) picks up Frank's story about six years later. It is July 1988, Frank is 44, and he has given up sportswriting, which he says "is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal." He now sells houses in Haddam, a leafy New Jersey exurb that bears more than a passing resemblance to Princeton, where he and his wife were once happy. She has remarried and moved to Connecticut with the two surviving children. And the elder one, Paul, 15, has entered a rough patch of adolescence, so much so that he faces a court hearing on July 5 for stealing condoms from a local mall.

So Frank confronts a particularly busy Fourth of July weekend. After dozens of false starts, he wants to get two of his balkier clients to say yes to a house he shows them. Then he wants to slip down to the Jersey shore and spend the night with his girlfriend Sally. And he has committed himself to a two-day trip with the troubled Paul, their ultimate destination the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown: "If your son begins suddenly to fall at a headlong rate, you must through the agency of love and greater age throw him a line and haul him back."

Independence Day thus repeats the effective formula of The Sportswriter: a flurry of intense activity in the present, coinciding with a holiday and offering Frank time to ruminate on a past that still troubles him and whose meaning he would like to pin down.

And for the most part the sequel lives up to its predecessor. Frank is an entertaining storyteller, as loquacious as the people in Ford's more recent books (Rock Springs, Wildlife) are laconic. His conviction that it is possible to behave honorably-even while selling real estate-and to be useful to his fellow citizens commands respect. But his monopoly on the narrative eventually causes some uneasiness. Filled to the brim as he is with good intentions, Frank has a way of attracting misery to those around him. He reports these mishaps straightforwardly enough, but does not devote much thought or comment to his potential role in causing them. In the end he remains a bigger mystery to the reader than he is to himself.