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Web-Exclusive Book Review
The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford (Knopf)
Review by Bill Lenderking, November 2006
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The unpredictability of everyday life and the calamity that often lies just
around the bend pervade the events that unfold in Richard Ford's The Lay
of the Land, the third novel in his epic trilogy on the life and times of
an upper-middle-class New Jersey Everyman, Frank Bascombe.
The first novel in the trilogy,
The Sportswriter (1986), was Ford's breakout book and certified
him as a major contemporary talent. The second,
Independence Day (1995), won both the Pulitzer Prize and the
Pen/Faulkner the same year, and was an American masterpiece.
The Lay of the Land takes place over three days around Thanksgiving
2000, and a good part of the novel consists of Bascombe's observations on
just about everything that crosses his vision: people, houses (Bascombe is a
successful real estate agent), social trends, his two children, friends and wives,
bartenders, policemen, and more. Much of this is by turns wry, insightful,
amusing, profound, mundane, or poignant, but there is a lot of it and in places
it verges on excess. That is, until the realization sinks in that what is
parading before the reader's eyes is not just a snapshot of suburban
America at the dawn of a new century, but an x-ray into the heart and soul of a
man whose observations reveal his own anxieties, hopes, and disappointments,
including his awareness that he is an underachiever and not terribly upset
about it.
 
To outward appearances, Frank Bascombe has an enviable life. He is the owner
of a profitable two-man real estate business on the New Jersey shore, a locale
that enables Ford to explore class distinctions; ethnic, racial, and gender
identities and tensions; and generational and cultural differences. Frank is
decent, intelligent, easygoing, and tolerant, but also acute about things and
people who annoy him. He has two grown children by his first marriage: the
lovely Clarissa, whom he adores, and who entered a lesbian relationship after
graduating from Harvard; and Paul, a resentful writer of greeting-card verses
for Hallmark who lives in Kansas City. Both turn up for Thanksgiving, and the
encounter is one of many revealing incidents that in their unique ways remind
Frank of unfulfilled ambitions and regrets as, over the three days, he picks
his way through the various strands of his life.
Frank's seemingly comfortable, unchallenging life turns out to be far
more complicated than it first seems, and many of his observations and musings
might be grouped under a single thematic thread: how to cope. Since the entire
novel is written in the first person, all the characters and events—and
there are many of them—are filtered solely through Frank's
perceptions. But such is Ford's mastery of detail and unerring eye that the
New Jersey locale and the colorful array of characters that inhabit it seem as
familiar as the reader's own neighbors, friends, and family.
In one of many marvelous passages, Frank ponders the impossibility of
bringing about life changes through a change of scene: "…in the end
old concerns are only transported to a new venue, where they go back to
worrying the same as before…. Change the water in the bowl and you
become a different fish. But that's not so…not a
bit…"
Hours pile on hours in the three days, chronicling seemingly unimportant
events, but we learn that Frank's wife has left him for a former husband
presumed dead, and his ex-wife has made an overture at reconciliation. His
treatment for prostate cancer dogs his thoughts at every turn, as well as his
problematic and regretful relationships with his now grown children, wives,
former and potential girlfriends, colleagues, and friends.
Nothing out of the mundane seems to happen, but in short order there is a
hospital bombing in Frank's former hometown, street thugs break his car
window while he's watching a building demolition, he attends a friend's
funeral, gets into a fight in a bar, and clashes with neighbors.
This is not to say that the novel is punctuated by a series of jarring,
melodramatic incidents. Ford's genius is in portraying the significance of
the prosaic, weaving the ordinary occurrences as they unfold into a far richer
whole that plumbs the essence of a complex but sympathetic human being. Readers
will find echoes here of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, but
Ford's voice is original and fresh with its own insights.
It's easy to identify with Frank Bascombe and the world he inhabits;
there's probably something of him in many American males of his
genre: fiftyish, suburban, college-educated, financially comfortable,
likable but troubled by aspects of his comfortable life and his place in his
world.
What Bascombe's ruminations and the incidents of his life artfully
convey is that life is uncertain, disaster lurks when least expected,
disappointments accompany us at every turn. We want to do things right, but
often they don't turn out that way, and for no clear reason.
In the course of the novel, Frank learns many things, but never as the
result of a sudden epiphany. It's more "a practical acceptance of
what's what, in real time and down to earth…" What the novel
offers is a series of powerful insights on facing the realities and
uncertainties of middle age. And in the end, in a profound and moving final
passage, Ford suggests that our destiny is to "to live, to live, to live
it out," and in the process leave "our human scale upon the
land."
Bill Lenderking is a retired career foreign service officer who is now a
freelance writer.
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