Frank Bascombe returns in Richard Ford's latest

The advantage of a series of books about the same fictional character is that the reader— and, presumably, the writer — knows what to expect, at least roughly. The potential disadvantage is that we naturally compare the series' latest book to its predecessors, a comparison that can be as unflattering as it is unfair.

So it goes with Let Me Be Frank With You, Richard Ford's autumnal, fitfully moving new collection of four linked novellas featuring Frank Bascombe, whom we met previously in a celebrated trilogy of novels: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006).

From the first, the Bascombe saga was one of psychic survival in the face of mounting losses. Frank has always been defined by what he no longer has: a son, a literary career, a wife, a sense of purpose. And as always, his response is to withdraw, to minimize risks by keeping his thoughts and emotions to himself. (His saving grace is that, as narrator, he lets the reader in on the inner turmoil that no one else is privy to.)

In Let Me Be Frank With You — the title is embarrassingly awkward until you think about its brutal irony, at which point it seems like a stroke of genius — Frank is hunkered down inside his self-protective carapace of detachment. He's 68, retired from the real-estate business and living out his days in relative contentment in Haddam, N.J., in the weeks after Hurricane Sandy's catastrophic visit to the nearby Jersey Shore.

Frank makes the occasional half-hearted attempt to stay in the game of life — reading to the blind, welcoming vets coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan — but most of his energy, such as it is, is devoted to the serious business of not getting involved in the affairs of others. For Frank, hell is other people, largely because their struggles tend to make you reflect on your own — a cause and effect best avoided. "A wound you don't feel," Frank says, "is not a wound."

But like Michael Corleone, just when Frank thinks he's out, they pull him back in. Each of the stories in Let Me Be Frank culminates in an ominous encounter with someone from his past: a former client to whom he sold a house, now destroyed by Sandy; a woman who once lived in Frank's current house, whose tragic history she reveals; his first wife, Ann, now a Parkinson's patient ensconced in a pricey retirement home; and an old acquaintance, dying of cancer in his lonely mansion, who summons Frank for what turns out to be a startling confession. Each time, old wounds reopen.

The book's great flaw is its relative shapelessness. The structure of Let Me Be Frank With You doesn't allow for the foreshadowing and mirroring effects that gave Independence Day — which won the Pulitzer Prize and is, in hindsight, the Bascombe saga's high point — such a satisfying feeling of architectural cohesion.

On the other hand, you don't read the Bascombe books for plot. You read them for Ford's gleaming sentences, which in Let Me Be Frank are as burnished as ever, and for the quality of Frank's questing intelligence, which persists in sensing what's coming.

"I have these sensations more than I like to admit, since they make me feel that something bad is closing in — like the advance of a shadow across a square of playground grass where I happen to be standing," he says. "When the shadow covers the last grass blade, the air goes suddenly chill and still, and all is up for me."

For now, Frank is keeping the shadow at bay. Lucky us.

Let Me Be Frank With You

By Richard Ford

Ecco, 240 pp.

3 stars out of four