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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Frank enters the Permanent Period, 17 Jun 2007
Lay of the Land is the third novel in which Richard Ford charts the life of Frank Bascombe. Frank is now in his fifties, and is a realtor (an estate agent) on the coast of New Jersey. He is in his second marriage and in the throes of what he calls the "Permanent Period", that stage of life where most things that can go wrong have already gone wrong, and where generally speaking things don't get messed up any more - at least in the catastrophic way that earlier stages are subject too.
Needless to say, the Permanent Period turns out to be no protection from family squalls and rifts, and even second marriages, seemingly so settled can go badly and unexpectedly wrong. And then there's always prostate cancer, to make sure that Frank has to make adjustments to those areas of his life so far unaffected.
The charm of this novel, like its predecessors, is that nothing much happens. Frank is allowed to tell his story in his usual meandering way. A trip into town can give rise to pages of observations and reflections, somewhat in the way of W G Sebald, or even Marcel Proust. What makes this work is that Frank has a wondrously philosophical attitude to life, not one that insulates him from problems, but one which enables him to interpret them and live through them in an almost Buddhist way, where trouble is rarely confronted full on, but rather side-stepped and averted by Frank's huge tolerance and patience. The reader finds him/herself drifting along with Frank, and can find himself saying, hey, this approach might work with me too, if only I wasn't so uptight and frantic. Richard Ford has cast Frank's real-estate assistant as a Tibetan Buddhist immigrant, called (unusually) Mike Mahoney. It is interesting to see as the book develops, that maybe Frank is the better Buddhist than this disciple of the Dalai Llama.
Frank is a completely believable character, and although the book only covers a period of a few days, it is full of incidents that show how Frank deals with his family and friends. By the end, readers will have learned a lot about what makes him tick, and maybe like me, they will think that Frank may be quite a good guy to know, and maybe they could learn something about dealing with the huge amounts of stuff that has to be dealt with in the course of a fairly routine life. Highly recommended - if you like this kind of thing, and I do.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bittersweet Downshift In Life Expectations , 13 Nov 2006
"This novel showcases many of Mr. Ford's gifts: his ability to capture the nubby, variegated texture of ordinary life; his unerring ear for how ordinary people talk; his talent for conjuring up subsidiary characters with a handful of brilliant brushstrokes.
MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times
Frank Bascombe, real estate manager, aka sportswriter and novelist is in the prime of his life. He is on what he describes as ""the permanent phase" of his life, the period when life "starts to look like a destination rather than a journey". He is 55, his second wife has left him for her first husband, he has prostate cancer, his daughter is moving from her lesbian phase to what exactly? His son has a girlfriend and wants a relationship with his father. But Paul, the son is overbearing and what was it that Frank did not give him? His first wife, Anne, calls and wants to start another relationship, But, do they really love each other? These and other life problems all emerge within three days of this 500 page novel.
These three days take place in 2000. I began to see the irony of Frank's thinking his life is going down a permanent road, when the election of Bush has just taken place. There is no peace in America or in Frank's life at this time. We find that events and tragedy's spring up around us at all times. Frank realizes he has fear for 'The Lay of the Land' in 2000, and, as we all know 9/11/2001 is just around the corner. We have the luxury of looking back as Frank tells his story.
Some parts of this novel are too limiting, the explosion in the local hospital and one of the police officers must question him as a suspect but that never occurs. His first wife has but a small part in the novel and it is confusing, but I wonder if her part is to explain that we are all looking for love and may be confused about where we will find it. The next door neighbors are strange and the final chapter leaves no explanation. people come and people go in these three days and we learn allot. Frank is a man that we feel some sympathy for but do we really like him? Yes, he has his faults, and I see some of mine in him. This is a book to ponder and re-read. Frank is wondering what his last days will be like, he wonders as he is ordering a complete Thanksgiving dinner that is organic and elite and is it edible.
I consider this book to be one of the best of the year. Like Cormac McCarthy's book, 'The Road' the other great book of this year. 'Lay of the Land' looks back to look at what has happened while "The Road" looks to the future so we can contemplate where we are.
"Yet while the melancholy settles in deeper this time, Bascombe remains what he always has been: a funny, kind and gentle man, a possessor, as one critic observed, of the "mysteriousness of the agreeable, nice person, harder to describe than the rake, miser or snob". Which is to say, he is not merely pleasant. Ford has kept Emerson in mind throughout: "Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none." Bascombe is willing to speak difficult truths and does so; but he doesn't enjoy it and says so. "
BRIAN McCLUSKEY, The Scotsman
Highly, Highly Recommended. prisrob 11-13-06
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15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Now I lay me down to sleep..., 16 Jul 2007
Richard Ford has impeccable taste in fiction, as we know from his introductions to UK editions of James Salter's Light Years and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. He also enjoys greatness by association with his old friends, the late Raymond Carver and the not late (except when it comes to turning out novels) Tobias Wolff. And his last collection of stories, A Multitude of Sins, was a delight. But I get the impression that what he wants to be remembered for are the Frank Bascombe novels: The Sportswriter (1984), Independence Day (1995) and now The Lay of the Land. A clue to this comes in the early pages of chapter 1, where the uncommon word angstrom appears. Of course! It's Rabbit by Richard.
And The Lay of the Land does seem more than either of the others to be Ford's attempt to square up to Updike and give the world his own Harry Angstrom. It seems less interested in doing something new (it copies the structure of Independence Day: the detailed moment-by-moment recreation of the days approaching a public holiday - this time Thanksgiving - and a dramatic event near the end), and is content to examine Bascombe's life with positively forensic attention.
This is not without event - Bascombe gets involved along the way in a bar brawl, a terrorist attack, and several switchbacks of his present and previous love lives - but there's no denying that it does get at times extremely boring. It's hard to tell whether this is deliberate - Frank after all is an estate agent and not a man given to outbursts of emotion - and at times this quality made it the ideal holiday read, as I had nothing else with me to put it down for. Ford's prose is not the match of Updike's, or Salter's for that matter, and in storytelling circles Yates leaves him standing.
Nonetheless the book was not at all a difficult or reluctant read, and there are moments of brilliant observation, such as this assessment of Bascombes' Tibetan employee, Mike Mahoney:
"In this, he's like many of our citizens, including the ones who go back to the Pilgrims: He's armed himself with just enough information, even if it's wrong, to make him believe that what he wants he deserves, that bafflement is a form of curiosity and that these two together form an inner strength that should let him pick all the low-hanging fruit."
This also plays into the Rabbitesque background to the book: the recounts and court challenges to the 2000 Bush/Gore election, which gives Ford a chance to put some choice anti-Bushisms in Bascombe's mouth.
Finally, there is the inevitable impressed satisfaction of reading any book this length, that the author should have managed to sustain the performance for so long, even if we didn't always enjoy it that much (or perhaps, as Forster once suggested, we tend to overpraise long books simply because we have got through them). Oh, and a word about that: my obsession with flagrant page-bloat has been mentioned before, but I think swelling the page count from 496 in the hardback to 726 in the paperback sets a new record. Unless of course you are even more anally retentive than I am about things like that, and know better.
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