Narrative Forms of Adaptation, Retreat, and Mitigation in Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank with You

Abstract

This article examines narrative engagement with strange weather and rising waters in Richard Ford's Let Me Be Frank with You (2014). It applies three terms from climate policy—adaptation, retreat, and mitigation—as heuristic concepts to approach the formal responses in the novel to a catastrophic event, Hurricane Sandy, while also considering the broader implications for the interplay between narrative form and radical climate change. The focus is on narrative forms such as catalogs, gaps in language and in the storyworld, and plotted instances of compassion. By drawing from environmental policy terms, this article suggests an analogy between how literary fiction functions and how human populations are described as behaving in the language of policy. Literature is adapting in formal terms to a changing climate; it is retreating from the effects of climate disruption, by way of a diluted language; and it is trying to find ways to soften and mitigate those effects—with mitigation approached in its first, now largely obsolete meaning of the word, as compassion. Exploring such analogies, this article emphasizes literary form's participation in a broader discursive and material meshwork of human relationships with the transforming environment, in dialogue with science and policy communications.