Liking Art Is Subjective

 KH keeps telling me this as the rejections come. I know this. Why KH keeps repeating this is more of an explanation to himself of why those stories of mine he likes are not getting picked up by editors.

Well, here is another example, I read one Richard Ford novel in prison and I heard him on NPR's Fresh Air. He has a new novel out, and the reviews have varied. For those posts, follow this link.

However, none have been like The Sydney Morning Herald's review: It’s hard to see a better novel being published this year. A taste:

He is a character of some grandeur, intimately surveyed, in terms of family and love and loss, so that we return to him as if to an intimacy foregone or put on hold. Be Mine is about Bascombe tending to the needs of his son, Paul, who has a deadly motor neurone disease, ALS, that impacts everything until nothing is left but a mute feeling of pain.

If this sounds like the worst possible subject matter for a middle-sized novel by an old master, it is not. Be Mine is as realised and impassioned, as full not only of sorrow but of buoyant wit and sparkle, as anything Ford has written: a comprehensive image not simply of life in extremis but of the jokes and wryness, the mutual mockery in the face of love, that this weird father/son conjunction provides.

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