Your Independence Day Philistinism

The leisurely hysteria that is general across the country on the afternoon before a holiday was observed in Pittsburgh today. The clotting of major byways as people escape work, the throngs trapped in supermarket lines, and the seemingly spontaneous weekend feeling–unplaceable but real–are all in evidence this evening. Because of that and because the holiday in question is Independence Day (and because I’m moderately bookish, of course, and because a new blog post was sorely needed), my thoughts turn toward the novel Independence Day, by Richard Ford. It was a Pulitzer Prize winner and I can remember when I was 16 or so seeing its lovely paperback cover in prominent bookstore displays, the title and the photograph of a screen door with rain drops lodged in its tiny cells combining to make me think the novel would distill that listless-holiday feeling.

Let me throw this out there: I have tried to read this novel, and I have never come close to finishing it. I finished and enjoyed (moderately) The Sportswriter, the prelude to Independence Day featuring the same main character, Frank Bascombe. Certain of Ford’s stories (”Communist,” of course, and the one where the guy hooks a dead deer with his fishing rod) utterly floor me. And yet the book that’s thought to be his masterwork is so utterly tedious and unfulfilling to me that I have ended up not just bored but in that weird place of getting angry at the thing that is boring you so thoroughly; throwing-the-book-across-the-room territory.

Am I a complete philistine? Does my failure to finish Independence Day betray a fatal lack of character? Of literary taste? I am interested in being persuaded to suck it up and stick with Frank Bascombe, but I’m also wondering how alone I am in this opinion.
~Adam