Independence Day

“To anyone reasonable, my life will seem more or less normal-under-the-microscope, full of contingencies and incongruities none of us escapes and which do little harm in an existence that otherwise goes unnoticed.”

Frank sees his life as ordinary. To him, he is essentially a nameless face in the crowd. The tone here calls to mind Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” and suggests an internal struggle to make his life matter.

“His poor brother, Ralph, who died of Reye’s, should also be alive (as he surely should) and we should all still be we.”

Frank is speaking of his son Paul here, but he projects his own views onto Paul. The passage underscores the trauma that both Frank and Paul have experienced and continue to struggle with overcoming. Reye’s syndrome is a rare but serious condition that tends to afflict children, causing liver damage and swelling in the brain.

“There is no such thing as a false sense of well-being.”

Frank repeats this comment later in the novel. It implies his realization that life is a continuous struggle, and when good moments arise, you should embrace them rather than question their authenticity or whether they are deserved or not. However, one can take this philosophy too far. By not interrogating moments of felt happiness, a person can inhibit their emotional growth.

“Writing sports, as anyone can tell you who’s ever done it or read it, is at best offering a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells while someone eats breakfast cereal, waits nervously in the doctor’s office for CAT-scan results or mulls away dreamy, solitary minutes in the can.”

Frank alludes to his former profession as a sportswriter. With this view of the profession, it is no wonder that Frank left it without hesitation. That said, at this point in the novel Frank values harmless pursuits, in keeping with his attitude toward his “existence period.”

“Why should you only get what you think you want, or be limited by what you can simply plan on? Life’s never like that, and if you’re smart you’ll decide it’s better the way it is."

The context here is real-estate, and Frank is talking about the Markhams. In a broader sense, Frank critiques the limitations to single-mindedness. His ability to cut out desire from his life puts a Buddhist spin on his “existence period.”

“And not buying what you can’t afford’s not a compromise; it’s reality speaking English. To get anywhere you have to learn to speak the same language back.”

Frank speaks again about the Markhams. While the comment is directly about real-estate, the larger meaning is that to make sense of life, people need to learn how to accept truth. A person cannot live a life of pretending.

“A good liver would be a man or woman who’d distilled all of life that’s important down to a few inter-related principles and events, which are easy to explain in fifteen minutes and don’t require a lot of perplexed pauses and apologies for this or that being hard to understand exactly if you weren’t there."

The passage here provides a deeper insight into Frank’s so-called “existence period.” The urgency to simplify life and strip it of what is inessential is one of Frank’s primary motivations for much of this period in his life. However, a person can also oversimplify their life, to the point that they cut out the things that make it special and unpredictable.

“Though what I in time began to sense in France was actually a kind of disguised urgency (disguised, as urgency often is, as unurgency)”

Frank speaks here of his spontaneous trip to France. He stayed there for a few months with a younger woman, Catherine Flaherty. At the heart of the comment is a tendency to convince oneself that they are in an urgent situation and respond as such, only to later learn that maybe the situation wasn’t so urgent after all.

“When you’re young your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it and the problem of getting away from it.”

This is the perspective from middle-age, according to Frank. Frank admits that he is running from the past. Interestingly, he does not use the word “old” but instead uses “not young” indicating his unease at referring to himself as such.

“I found that when Ann and I divorced because she couldn’t put up with me and my various aberrations of grief and longing owing to the death of our first son, and just flew the coop.”

The grief Frank alludes to here is over the death of his son Ralph. Frank blames himself rather than Ann for being unable to handle grief, which he states was the cause of their divorce. There is also an implication that Frank engaged in extramarital affairs to cope with his despair.

“It’s a matter of my age that all new events threaten to ruin my precious remaining years. Nothing like this feeling happens when you’re thirty-two.”

This is another comment that reveals Frank’s underlying unease with growing older. It also reveals Frank’s growing awareness of his mortality and the anxiety that disaster could strike at any minute. This is a natural outgrowth of knowing that he likely has fewer years ahead of him than he does behind him.

“No one is very far from a crime statistic, and the general recognition of how much we take our safety for granted.”

This is another comment that shows a closer look into Frank’s anxiety. While in vague terms, he might be right, his preoccupation with taking safety for granted recalls the previous passage. Frank sees disaster looming around every corner.

“At the same time it also gets harder and harder to believe you can control anything via principle or discipline, though we all talk as if we can, and actually try like hell.”

This is another of Frank's mid-life observations. Here, he hints at a nihilistic view of life. Frank suggests his deterministic belief that people have no power over their lives, though they trick themselves into believing that they do.

“The best all-around Americans, in my view, are Canadians. I, in fact, should think of moving there, since it has all the good qualities of the states and almost none of the bad, plus cradle-to-grave health care and a fraction of the murders we generate. An attractive retirement waits just beyond the forty-ninth parallel.”

This is one of the novel’s funnier moments, Frank pokes fun at Canadians, but his view of America is quite critical. Once again, beneath the comedy are references to the American murder rate and its health-care problem, both of which hint at Frank’s mid-life anxieties.

“Death, veteran of death that I am, seems so near now, so plentiful, so oh-so-drastic and significant, that it scares me witless.”

Frank makes a confession here. Ge admits that he fears growing old and the inevitable result of that. He also indirectly connects growing older with experiencing the death of others, a process that naturally only increases with age.

“’And you’re also very cautious, you know,’ Sally says. ‘And you’re noncommittal. You know that, don’t you?’”

Sally says this to Frank. She infers that Frank is afraid of commitment, something that Frank has been saying about himself as the first-person narrator throughout the novel, though not in these precise words. In this passage, readers get a more precise understanding of Frank’s character because it comes from someone else.

“The town is just a replica (of a legitimate place), a period backdrop to the Hall of Fame or to something even less specific, with nothing authentic (crime, despair, litter, the rapture) really going on no matter what civic illusion the city fathers maintain.”

Frank is speaking of Cooperstown, New York here, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The passage critiques the way Americana is artificially marketed and produced as a novelty item. To Frank, the “real” America is much darker and dirtier.

“Parents, of course, think about dying day and night—especially when they see their children one weekend a month. It’s not so surprising their children would follow suit.”

Frank makes a blanket assumption here. Leaving aside whether his opinion is accurate or not, he again confesses his fear of and preoccupation with death. This fear is compounded in that Frank is worried about both his own death and the death of his children.

“’I love you,’ I say to my son, slipping away, but who should hear these words again if only to be able to recall much later on: ‘Somebody said that to me, and nothing since then has really seemed quite as bad as it might have.’”

Frank offers one of the more heartwarming comments of the novel here. He reflects on the hope that making his son feel loved will make the struggles of his life seem less daunting. Paul’s injury at the batting cages is a turning point for Frank, who will soon grow out of his “existence period” as a result.

“And that is the picture I will keep of him forever.”

Frank takes a picture of Paul at the diner the morning of Paul’s accident. He is smiling in the picture. Frank realizes the significance of this picture in that it is maybe the last that he will be able to take of Paul as a child.

“Incidents we can’t control make us what we are—eh, Frank?”

Frank’s stepbrother Irv asks this question. Throughout the novel, Frank grapples with the idea of how individuals respond to things they can’t control. Irv implies that how a person responds to what they can’t control is what makes them who they are. This is the antithesis to Frank’s more nihilistic beliefs.

“They are, I’m certain, locked away in some wondrous, soundproof kids’ wing, with every amusement, diversion, educational device, aid and software package known to mankind at their fingertips, all of it guaranteed to keep them out of the adults’ hair for years.”

Frank is speaking of the children at the Yale Club where Ann is visiting when Paul is hurt. The comment anticipates the growing trend in the modern era of keeping kids busy with all manner of distraction. In Frank’s view this works to the children’s detriment and to the benefit of their parents.

“And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been.”

Paul departs in the helicopter when Frank makes this observation. Inherent in his comment is an awareness of how parents see the passage of time in their children even more so than in themselves. Thus, parenthood is at best a bittersweet experience for Frank.