My Ears! My Ears! Dept.

Richard Ford’s Hero Returns in ‘Let Me Be Frank With You’ - NYTimes.com

Frank [the protagonist of Ford's novel] almost seems like a parody of a professorial liberal, who talks about buying Aaron Copland’s “whole oeuvre” online. Which brings us to another problem with Mr. Ford’s depiction of Frank in these pages, a problem Updike also had, at times, in depicting Rabbit: that is, a tendency to ascribe dialogue or thoughts to their middle-class, Everyman characters that are hard to imagine being...