Every aspect of human behaviour, he argues, has a genetic base, from a guilty conscience to our enduring belief in romantic love. Or something like Wright.Robert Wright comes from an honourable tradition of scientific thinkers – which includes the Californian physiologist Jared Diamond and our own Richard Dawkins – who are adept at using words or television to popularise new theories that would otherwise remain dry and unreachable. And despite a tendency to overstress the environmental issues being raised, Bush’s last chapter, like the first, is superbly done.. The switch between third- and Helen’s first-person narration cleverly evokes a sense of the fracture of her personality, and of the hard choices she has to make, and Bush does create a sympathetic character in Helen – if you can overlook her misguided affection for the flaky Foster, her animal-rights activist boyfriend. I preferred Mami Giselle, my other grandmother who wore a turban and was a sculptress in Africa. Never mind that she married three times and her love life was miserable Mami Simone, I thought, was a bit of a fruitcake. Like most teenagers, I simply knew I was right.Turns out, it was probably Mami Simone, after all, who was right.
WHEN I was growing up, I was occasionally taken to visit one of my two French grandmothers who lived in Paris and, perhaps for that reason, saw herself as something of an expert on men. Mami Simone, as she was known, liked to dispense advice over a small pastis
“You talk too much,” she’d say “Don’t Men prefer women who are modest. Always have several admirers at once, and never sleep with a man until…” She would pause, and count on her fingers. “Until you’ve been on one, two, three dates.”
It was the sort of admonition that made me want to thump her. If there’s a problem with this premise, it’s that it’s too good. Having set up a perfect opportunity for a study of confused identities, Bush never really gets her teeth into the business, and the book turns into a heartfelt but slightly rambling account of what happens to a family when mother and father are both off doing ultra-demanding jobs. Helen and Paul, having decided not to turn up at the official family send-off for the astronauts, witness the launch from the roadside some miles away.
When they check out the launch later on television, however, they see that stand-ins were found for the absent Urie family: an ersatz father and two kids dutifully waving goodbye. In the end, as Bascombe finds peace on the Fourth after a series of crises, Ford, like Pynchon, edges towards a faith that people, and specifically American people, will pull through together You almost believe him.. HELEN URIE’s mother Barbara has waited for this moment all her life: blast-off. The America of this book is both utopian, pure (neat small towns, the Fourth of July as “an observance of human possibility”, Bascombe’s scorn for European attempts to understand his country) and harassed, fraying. Ford expresses the lyricism, menace and banality of his country with as much force as Thomas Pynchon’s own Eighties epic Vineland, minus the latter’s kooky lapses.
And Ford’s descriptive writing is so beautifully concrete – recording the “sharp Coke-bottle poink” of bat striking baseball outside the Hall of Fame – that each little event lingers in the mind. He buys a pair of undervalued old houses in the black part of town, rents them out to tenants in need, collects the profits – and agonises when he’s seen as the exploiter In fact, his worries are most of the book. Occasionally this gets too much, with Ford unreeling yet another Bascombe free-association about “the Existence Period” while the story idles.But most of the time Bascombe’s dilemmas are compelling. He knows the material contours of his hometown, the racial property divides and the sad new blue-collar suburbs, and he knows the mental contours too, the triumphalism of the rich investors and the desperation of poor buyers – most poignantly the ex-hippie couple, dropping down the price and status scale amid “the cannibalistic financial forces gnashing and churning the world”.Bascombe’s beliefs are caught, too, between deal-by-deal realpolitik and a vaguer urge to do good (he’s a liberal Democrat) by selling people a new start. Partly it’s his intelligence, too restless and perceptive to focus on one thing for long: ringing his girlfriend from a public phone to say he loves her, he can’t stop imagining the lives of all the other callers.Yet Bascombe’s archetypal over-awareness comes from his job as well as his head. “Most Americans will eventually transact at least some portion of their important lives in the presence of realtors,” writes Ford in his modern, jargony American; he uses this idea to make Bascombe an all- seeing social observer. The real action is in Bascombe’s head, where mid-life memories, imaginings and existential musings form a flashing stream.