The novel, which is presumably the final Bascombe book, "explores happiness and denial, completing a social history of Ford's own boomer generation from midlife to end times.

"[2] Be Mine begins in February 2020 with Frank aged seventy-four and temporarily living in Rochester, Minnesota while caring for his forty-seven-year-old son Paul, who is a patient at the Mayo Clinic for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Frank is troubled by his son's impending death and also by his own mortality, having recently experienced an episode of global amnesia, but feels he has stoically embraced his new role as Paul's carer.

Frank has a distant relationship with his daughter Clarissa, their only other surviving family member, and has fallen in unrequited love with a young massage therapist.

There is a wizardry in the way Ford captures the patient humorous tone of Bascombe and the patent distress often repressed by wacko attempts at sly wit on the part of his son.

In Mr. Ford's hands, clichés become koans, simultaneously resonant and hollow depending on one's fortunes at the time, and to Frank they double as sound, practical counsel and bitter jokes.