Getting there

Richard Ford's road-trip novel is a nuanced portrait of a fractious father-son relationship - and a vision of Trump's America.

- TIM UPPERTON

BE MINE, by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury, $36.99)

Life's not really a journey, but it resembles one, and thus many stories of people's lives recount journeys too. There's Odysseus making his slow voyage back to Ithaca, Don Quixote armouring up and becoming a knight errant, Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale and Huck Finn and Jim lighting down the Mississippi. The modern embodiment of this genre is the road-trip novel, and nowhere more so than in the US, the natural home of the automobile, where Eisenhower's interstate highways unite and divide the nation's inhabitants. Richard Ford's new novel fits somewhere between the lyricism of On the Road and the bleakness of The Road, continuing the story of his perennial protagonist and first-person narrator Frank Bascombe, a kind of hyper-literate everyman.

Now old but not that old, Frank devises a road trip with his terminally ill son from Rochester, Minnesota, to Mt Rushmore. There's a reflexive irony at work here, in the novel and the trip itself: Bascombe's son, Paul, has long dreamed of visiting as many conceptually weird or oddly named places - Whynot, Mississippi; Stinking Springs, New Mexico; Cape Flattery, Washington; Sopchoppy, Florida - as possible. What's possible, of course, has diminished in the face of his rapidly advancing illness, so Mt Rushmore it is.