SOURCE: "The Poetry of Real Estate," in Commonweal, Vol. CXXII, No. 17, October 6, 1995, pp. 27-8.

[In the following review, Schroth notes that although the characters of Ford's Independence Day are searching for their independence, they are actually very interconnected.]

One of my regrets about not having money is that I'll never be able to buy a house. Still, I cannot jog the oak-lined streets of Uptown New Orleans or bike up Storm King Mountain at Cornwall-on-Hudson without casing every house I pass and asking if that house is "me."

Which is why, perhaps, Richard Ford, in his new novel, Independence Day, his continuation of The Sportswriter, has moved Frank Bascombe, his narrator and protagonist, from sports magazine journalism into the real-estate business. For the realtor, if he has moved his science to the level of art, is part social historian, part character analyst. He daily redraws the line of...