Frank Bascombe has entered his Existence Period. It’s that time in his life when he is unconnected to those around him, cut off from his ex-wife and two children who have decamped to Deep River, uncommitted to the current woman he is seeing, and fundamentally distant from himself. He tools around Haddam, New Jersey, in his large automobile, encased in a kind of protective shell, observing, noting, scoping out the particulars of properties he may be in line to shift in his new career as a realtor, idling at the curb and in his own life. But the Existence Period is unstable, bound to collapse at the first sign of real emotion, whether that be despair or hope in the face of tragedy. And tragedy is definitely lurking. Everywhere.

A momentous Fourth of July weekend descends into a nightmarish world of crazed house purchasers, senseless murder, self harm and mutilation, and the constant threat of violence meted out by others or oneself (if one’s impulses are given free rein), which is met by vigilance in the form of patrolling police, private security, metal bars on domestic windows, handguns, or mace. Or it is allowed to overwhelm one, washing through one’s life like a purging torrent. And there is little doubt that Frank, loquaciously professing platitudes and realtor buzz to stoke up the confidence of himself and his clients, is not up to the challenges that he is about to face. Little wonder that it seems highly likely that his Existence Period is about to come crashing to a close.

Once again Richard Ford’s writing is a marvel of density and light. He effortlessly draws the reader into claustrophobic inducing proximity to Frank’s mutable conscience and visceral encounter with his environment. Much of what we encounter here is remembered experience—a lot of ground has been covered between the end of The Sportswriter and the time of Independence Day. But how much of that reported experience is dependable? Frank is such a cocktail of conflicted emotions and aspirations overlaid with jaw-dropping rationalizations. A reader can’t help but begin to feel sorry for him (even if he isn’t especially likeable). You begin rooting for him to break the surface of his supposedly placid Existence Period even if doing so may destroy him.

And break through he does, though not in any way he would have planned or wished. And change does look set to come to Deep River and to Haddam. Crazed homebuyers transform into peaceable renters. The literally barking mad are rendered merely speechless. And Frank looks hopefully toward his next period, which may, he tells himself, be his Permanent Period.

Riveting reading. Highly recommended.

The death of Peter Goldie in late 2011, as is increasingly becoming evident, was an immense loss to philosophy. Few thinkers move so deftly between the rarefied atmosphere of analytic metaphysics, moral psychology, and ethics, and the real stuff of life, of who we are in our living rooms when we think about our lives. The posthumous publication of The Mess Inside, which was already completed at the time of his death, brings Goldie’s considerable insight to bear on the role of narrative in our lives. Not, as one might suspect (or hope), the role of fiction. But rather the role that our autobiographical narrative thinking has when we reflect on past actions (and errors), present plans, and future possibilities.

Goldie describes his view as a modest narrativist view. He disavows the strong narrativist stances of Alasdair MacIntyre and Marya Schechtman in which our self narratives constitute our selves. But equally he distances himself from anti-narrativists such as Galen Strawson who maintain that narrative has no role at all in establishing who we are. Goldie threads the needle with an account of narrative that acknowledges its capacity to provide narrative structure—coherence, meaningfulness, and evaluative and emotional import—to our lives without binding us to a fictionalizing metaphysics.

One of the distinctive components of Goldie’s view is found in his account of free indirect style, which he borrows from the literary critic James Wood. In literature, free indirect style facilitates an emergent dramatic irony as evaluative and emotional terms flit between a narrated subject and a narrator. Goldie argues that something similar occurs in our autobiographical narratives, where we also invest the actions of our narrated subjects (ourselves) with evaluative import: I think back now on my foolish behaviour at the office party last year. There, the regretful foolishness is projected by me as narrator on my own past action. This kind of self-reflective bootstrapping helps me to think through my past in preparation for a better, less foolish, future.

Equally important, perhaps, is Goldie’s use of the French notion of tâtonnement, which is a kind of tentative, groping towards something. It has a technical use in economics that Goldie, as a former investment banker, was no doubt aware. But here it characterizes the jumbled, blurry perspective we have on ourselves, a perspective that we revise again and again through our narrative thinking. It is, or can be, a lengthy process, but the narrative sense of self that emerges provides us, so Goldie maintains, with all we want and need in a narrativist account of the self, without the unfortunate fictionalizing metaphysical tendencies of strong narrativist theories.

There is a great deal here (much more than my brief survey permits me to show) to agree with, to question, and to outright reject. And there will undoubtedly be a fair amount of thinking, narrative or otherwise, spurred by Goldie’s substantial and subtle contribution. One only regrets that Goldie’s further participation in the conversation has come to a close.