In 2014, Ford told the New Yorker that the relationship between his books and Updike’s was “complicated,” elaborating: “I have to say, with no reluctance, that if John hadn’t written the Rabbit books I might not have thought (as his contemporary) that three, then four, books about a real-estate salesman in New Jersey could be plausible.” He went on to highly praise Updike but also noted that he had read only one of the four Rabbit novels all the way through.

Aside from the obvious fact that they are protagonists of multivolume series by popular and acclaimed writers, Rabbit and Frank have been linked throughout the years by what they’ve been taken to represent: Each has been called an “everyman” too many times to count. It’s a word — and a projection — redolent of the 20th century. We’re too culturally atomized now to expect even broadly drawn individuals to reflect our collective life in any meaningful way, and of course those labeled “everyman” have nearly always been White suburban males, whose relevance as cultural avatars (much less weathervanes) has been in steep decline. This all leaves aside the fact that Ford and Updike have both written eloquently to say that these characters are not meant to represent anything but themselves.

These series now span 64 years in the country’s life, and there’s no denying that taken together they offer a panoramic view. Updike’s name retains a sense of prestige, but he isn’t widely read at the moment. Ford, nearly 80, is not the central literary figure he once was. There’s no telling whether Rabbit or Frank will have many readers at all in another 25 years or more. So with what seems likely to be the last Bascombe book in hand, it felt worthwhile to revisit the Rabbit books and to briefly assess these two, even eulogize them; everymen or not, their kind is probably extinct, and not only because they required their contemporary American context in order to exist.

Frank Bascombe is 74 in “Be Mine,” his aches and pains “the result of nothing more than being alive.” His son Paul, 47, is suffering from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and going through experimental treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Father and son have been there for two months when the book starts.

Once Paul is released from the clinic, Frank wants to drive him to Mount Rushmore — an especially perverse desire in the dead of winter. In “Independence Day,” the second book in the series, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996, Paul was 15, and he and Frank took a long road trip to the baseball and football Halls of Fame. At that time, Frank was wondering if Paul’s eccentricities could be chalked up to “haywire neurotransmitters” and expressed gladness that his son seemed unlikely to become a true lunatic, as he had “yet to exhibit any of the ‘big three’” symptomatic behaviors of “childhood homicidal dementia.”

Paul is a rock in the new novel’s gears. It’s not that he’s off-putting, though he is, physically — he resembles Larry Flynt, Frank tells us, with “short, warty fingers,” a “refrigerator-interior skin tone” and “a tangy metal smell, possibly from his medication” — and in other ways, too. His jokes are often sub-juvenile and his emotional intelligence stunted at best. But he’s also, more distractingly, difficult to situate as a character — not in the sense that he’s humanly complex but that his behavior and tone veer a bit haphazardly from scene to scene. The spell of him is frequently broken.

It signals a change from the earlier Bascombe books that Paul, though never handed the narrator’s mic, so fully shares the stage with Frank. The novels have bustled with ex-wives and girlfriends and colleagues and house hunters and the younger Paul, but they’ve never been as close to a two-hander as this one is.

In previous novels Frank, a supreme annotator of the everyday, made reference to life’s “Existence Period,” a time of vibrancy and fresh experience, and to its “Permanent Period,” when the clay has mostly dried. I didn’t see a similar phase coined in “Be Mine,” but with Frank engaging in more prolonged eye contact with his mortality and mulling the death of another child — “The Sportswriter” opens with him meeting his first ex-wife to visit their young son Ralph’s grave — one might call it the “Final Period.”

“I happen to believe there’s plenty to be said for a robust state of denial about many things,” Frank tells us, “death being high on the list.” Well, maybe the “Denial Period,” then.

In “The Sportswriter,” Bascombe, who later becomes a real estate agent for most of the series, explains why he quit “real writing” after publishing an acclaimed collection of short stories: “I didn’t know with certainty what to say about the large world, and didn’t care to risk speculating. And I still don’t. That we all look at it from someplace, and in some hopeful-useful way, is about all I found I could say — my best, most honest effort. And that isn’t enough for literature, though it didn’t bother me much.”

This is the most winking line in the books, since it precisely describes Ford’s use of Bascombe in making literature. It is Frank’s uncertainty about the world, and his mixture of earnest searching and wry humor in attempting (not too strenuously) to make sense of it, that powers books in which conventionally dramatic incidents can be few and far between. Frank’s ex-wives and other intimates, he admits, have keenly felt (and voiced) that his “spiritual insulation from too much bad and too much good” is “not an ideal way to live life.” But for the reader, it is quite ideal.

Elizabeth Hardwick, praising Ford in the New York Review of Books, once wrote that “Bascombe’s cheerfulness is moderated by the dark wings of melancholy.” Frank is a great companion with whom to feel and think about, as he describes it in “Independence Day,” the “whistling longing you can’t seem to shake.” Readers are in the position of nonstop — if one-way — conversation with him, frequently passenger-side in the car as he surveys his surroundings. It’s not surprising that fans of the books often talk about enjoying Frank’s company.

The Rabbit books are nearly the opposite of this in effect. From the beginning of “Rabbit, Run,” Angstrom is somewhat opaque to us even as we closely trail him. If Ford seamlessly inhabits Frank, Updike moves Rabbit around like a chess piece, more interested in placing him in the middle of the choppier currents and debates of American life. One very reductive thing to say about the series is that the Rabbit books are rooted in ’60s tumult and its long wake; the Bascombe books, though first published during Reagan’s second term, reflect a Clintonian-era ease — again, denial? — about the general state of things.

It’s easy enough to conflate any author with his or her protagonist, especially one whose life spans across several books, and many have succumbed to this temptation, especially with Updike and Rabbit. But rereading the series reveals the limitations of this type of analysis.

Updike’s books are more disputatious than Ford’s — especially the second, “Rabbit Redux,” which was so eager to take on race relations in the ’60s that Updike made the gonzo decision to have Rabbit take Skeeter, a Black radical, and Jill, an adrift White teenage girl, into his suburban home as residents. The gathering of this trio resulted in scenes of jaw-dropping audacity (and, to be fair, ambition), some of which somehow worked and others of which spectacularly didn’t.

But while it’s easy to lampoon parts of “Redux,” it’s impossible to read it or any of the Rabbit books as solely Rabbit’s perspective on the world. Updike’s third person — which Ford said in the same New Yorker interview “creates a very different moral positioning” than his own first-person Bascombe novels — is a canny lens. There are times in “Redux,” for instance, when Skeeter clearly gets the argumentative better of Rabbit. And in “Rabbit, Run,” there’s a remarkable and darkly sympathetic 13-page scene from the close perspective of Janice, Rabbit’s wife, ending with the book’s climactic tragedy.

In Ford’s books, Frank strongly dislikes Donald Trump, and Republicans in general, though you might imagine many of his friends are registered that way, maybe passionately. And he believes in the standard liberal causes, even if he’s not about to belly up to any barricades. At his core he seems to be the apolitical type, a category the very existence of which increasingly draws cackles, and it’s the trait that might already date him most. It’s sometimes used to comic effect. (About a volunteer hospital aide: “Burt’s probably not a bad guy, confederate flag put to the side.”)

But his ultimate gift is that he’s observant, and therefore a useful barometer of what America has felt like during his lifetime. In “Be Mine,” this sometimes takes the form of mentioning that he’s afraid he will be randomly shot in public. (To be fair, he actually was shot in the third book, “The Lay of the Land,” though not during the kind of mass event he now envisions.) His more sustained riffs about how we live (and die) are still potent. In “Be Mine,” he’s incisive and funny about the American surface of competence, the rosy, can-do spirit slathered as a glaze over deeper suffering. At Mayo, he thinks: “‘Clinic’ is standard middle-western understatement for what Mayo really is — a glistening, many building’d, many-tiered, many-lobed, swarming colossus where, on any given day, thousands enter and thousands leave 200% confident that if there’s a cure for them, this is where it lives.” Most hospitals “dispense dread. Here, no one goes away unsatisfied, even if they leave in a box.” When he was there for prostate cancer two decades earlier, he remembers, “So restorative was the Mayo climate, I was glad something’d gone wrong so I could get it fixed here.”

In “Rabbit, Run,” Updike wrote of his protagonist: “He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it.” Rabbit was, at the time of feeling this truth, all of 26 years old. If he and Frank have anything most in common, it’s a bone-deep inquietude. In Rabbit’s case, this tends to express itself quite outwardly, in reckless affairs and shouting matches about the Vietnam War.

David Foster Wallace once called Updike’s male characters “heterosexual to the point of satyriasis.” Frank is moonier than that. He craves romantic and spiritual connection, and in “Be Mine” that involves a subplot about his relationship with Betty Tran, a 34-year-old masseuse in rural Minnesota. Other critics have pointed out the cringiness of this storyline, but in a time of, let’s say, hyper-morally-aware criticism, it’s worth considering how much of the cringiness is intentional. “If you told me,” Frank says of Betty, “that when she says she likes me (which she often says), she is merely venerating the elderly, I wouldn’t be surprised and not completely disappointed.” When he impulsively asks Betty to marry him (over the phone), she says: “Are you having a crisis?”

Rabbit is id, Frank ego. Maybe because Updike doesn’t put us exactly inside his man, Rabbit appears to often act and then deal with consequences, whereas there is nothing too small for Frank to analyze, rationalize or think himself out of. In “Be Mine,” a brief riff on free will captures his tone: “The idea of choice in most things is of course a feathery lie of western philosophy. Selling houses lets you know it. There, humans regularly choose then unchoose, choose then regret choosing, choose then rechoose, resist choosing, then choose wrong and learn to like it. Choice usually isn’t choice, only what you’re left with.”

While Updike’s series gained strength, if anything — “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest,” the third and fourth volumes, each won a Pulitzer Prize — there’s more a sense of diminishing returns with Frank, a hazard of his consistency perhaps. (Even good company can start to wear.) Still, I was glad to be with him again in “Be Mine,” and if he’s less vital these days, doesn’t he know it.

Ford once wrote in Bookforum that, in his view, “almost all novels — even the darkest ones — are fundamentally optimistic in nature: because they confirm that complex human life is a fit subject for our interest; and they presume a future where they’ll be read, their virtues savored, their lessons put into practice.”

Frank ponders happiness in “Be Mine,” figuring he should decide whether he has it or not “before the gray curtain comes down.” To “not bother with being happy is to give life less than its full due,” he thinks. “Which, after all, is what we’re here for. To give life its full due, no matter what kind of person we are. Or am I wrong?”

John Williams is the editor of Book World.