Independence Day.

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 (1986), 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 the shifting American Frontier--charts the highways, Shop Rite malls, suburban enclaves, shrines, motels, trailer parks, and honky tonks which speckle the skin over the American soul--and matches this particular acre with its two-bedroom clapboard bungalow with this particular migrant family's dream.

When we left Frank Bascombe in Easter week six years ago, he was thirty-eight, a Haddam (Princeton), New Jersey, recently divorced father of a boy and girl and a dead son whom he and his ex-wife (called "X") still. mourned. He was a good, though rootless, man, a seeker who struck others as having a "sense of ethics," though he consistently denies having the admirable traits which others perceive. Then he was ready for a fling in Florida with Cathy Flaherty, a Dartmouth student who admired his writing. We liked Frank, perhaps because he didn't judge, and we thought he might like us; and we wondered--hoping--whether he would return to his wife and to the serious fiction from which sportswriting had distracted him.

When we pick him up this 1988 fourth-of-July weekend, Frank is forty-four, and he and the nation which he both embodies and meticulously observes have, like an untended piece of property, gone down. Bush and Dukakis are squabbling for the presidency; Frank's wife Ann has married a rich, sixty-one-year-old architect, who "knows Bush," and taken the children to Connecticut. Frank has moved into Ann's former house in Haddam, has had his fling with Cathy in France, had another affair with a black real-estate partner who was later raped and murdered, keeps a girlfriend Sally in Mantoloking, and strives to apply his Good Samaritan instincts to real estate, taking good care of his two properties in a black neighborhood and dealing fairly and patiently with a thuggish client couple from Vermont. His plan: "to do for others while looking after Number One." Friends describe him as "sweet" and "priestly"; but we like him a little less. Perhaps as a sign of how American culture has coarsened, so has Frank's narrative vocabulary, and he occasionally addresses us in a vulgar lingo--of which The Sportswriter was relatively free.

Though Independence Day opens with Frank's seriocomic analysis of the Haddam real-estate business as the town gears up for the holiday weekend, the novel's focus soon becomes Frank's troubled fifteen-year-old son Paul. Frank fears the boy, once a lover of pigeons, may have killed a grackle just for kicks. Paul has grown fat, sloppy, and injury-prone, been arrested for shoplifting condoms, slugged his stepfather, and wrecked the family car. He goes around barking for his long-dead dog, and, in banter with his father, likes to talk dirty.

By his own lights as good a parent as he can be, Frank plans to "rescue" the boy by taking him on a holiday tour of the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. He will impart his fatherly wisdom, and, at the same time, by having Paul read the Declaration of Independence and Emerson's "Self Reliance," and by chatting in the car about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, he will enlist American history in his struggle for the boy's salvation. Ironically, Frank is also reverting to sports nostalgia, which Ford eviscerated in The Sportswriter, as if Cooperstown were an American Mecca, or Rome, or Lourdes, where exposure to the Great Pastime in its purest form could heal the scars of death and divorce.

Displaying again his astonishing mastery of New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York roadmaps--their physical as well as moral landscapes--Ford sweeps us in a four-day whirl through an election-year America which de Tocqueville foretold--filled with ambitious men but empty of lofty ambitions: Where Roy Dgers is not a cowboy hero but a fastfood joint on the Jersey Turnpike, where virtually everyone is divorced, where murder is almost as commonplace as the car alarm whining and whooping in the night, where the suspicious-looking Mexican youths cruising by your hot dog stand really are getting set to rob you, where the neighborhood cop or the "polite" security guard with the gold stud his ear symbolizes not security but the limitations of the coming police state.

And where, especially if we have read Ford's other books, we sense a catasophe lurking around the bend. Yet Ford's men and women, though they suffer from the American virus of excessive Individualism, yearn to be connected. In one startling, yet plausible, surprise, Frank's long-lost Jewish half-brother appears like a biblical angel at a moment of crisis to remind him of the hidden connuity that has linked his life. Though they celebrate "independence," Ford's characters are obviously dependent on one another, as if each one were a bird with one wounded wing who by hooking up with the other birds could flutter to safety. The implements of their connectedness--cellular phones, gas station pay phones, voice mail, helicopters, sex manuals, the Trenton Times, a discarded volume of Frank's short stories, routes 1, 91, and 84, and a people-mover in the Basketball Hall of Fame arena from which the tourists shoot baskets--are hardly spiritual. But occasionally they make possible what Ford terms that "Sistine Chapel touch," when two fingertips meet, and Richard Ford continues to create, in this stunning book, what William Dean Howells stated as his own goal, a "literature worthy of America."

Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., is a professor of journalism at Loyola University in New Orleans.