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Like a battered but persistent weather vane, Richard Ford's cagey, contentiously tender everyman, Frank Bascombe, refuses to quietly rust away.
In this follow-up to The Sportswriter (1986) and its critically feted sequel, 1996's Pulitzer Prize- and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning Independence Day, the compulsively brooding real-estate shill and erstwhile sports scribe makes a third survey of the minefield of modern life in anticipation of a holiday—in this case Thanksgiving 2000—and several interpersonal implosions.
As always, Ford's conspiratorial, deceptively dawdling prose and bracing insights into the American character make spending a few more days with Frank a pleasure (albeit a sometimes tedious and droning one). If The Lay of the Land initially seems the hastiest entry in the trilogy, Ford, like Bascombe, can't be underestimated—the novel's apparent superfluity may be its most pressing point.
Picking up a decade and a half after Independence Day, The Lay of the Land follows our hero on his rounds in and near his new hometown, fictitious Jersey Shore enclave Sea Clift. The locale isn't all that's changed in Frank's life: He's made Sally, his leggy girlfriend from the second book, Mrs. Bascombe No. 2 and, after an unexpected blast from the past, lost her to exile in the UK; he's started a highly profitable real-estate business and taken on a Buddhist-maxim-spouting Tibetan associate who goes by the ultra-assimilated name "Mike Mahoney"; and, most significantly, he's developed and is being inconclusively treated for prostate cancer.
Frank's ex-wife, Ann, and their now-ostensibly grown children, Paul and Clarissa, figure prominently, as do a few old friends (and at least one dead one) from The Sportswriter. The action culminates in the predictably fractured festivities and a violent, hyperbolically prescient conflagration that's reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Saturday, although it's more organically integrated into the narrative and not as head-clubbingly obvious a metaphor.
The novel's most graceful and disturbing metaphor, however, is Bascombe's disease. Like Paul's not-quite autism in the Reagan-era-set Independence Day, it reflects a wider, unanticipated cultural rot that surfaces in Frank's various pre-turkey day encounters. Americans—or at least middle-class Jerseyites—on the cusp of the Bush era (the election results are still in limbo over the course of the book) are a lonely, guilt-racked people restless to unleash everything ugly and impulsive in their natures; Frank's fistfight in a bar, awkward counseling session with a former lover, ongoing feud with a vindictive neighbor and other clashes reveal a nasty turn in the national mood.
Bascombe, a fiercely self-preservatory and frequently graceless emotional failure, is not immune; he continues to goad Paul (who's turned his embittered rebelliousness toward writing snarky greeting cards in Kansas) and makes a half-hearted pass at Clarissa's lesbian girlfriend, and in fact starts the barroom brawl by provoking a luckless ex-client. What salvages him personally and as one of American literature's more indelible creations is his incisive ruminating. The wry koans that made The Sportswriter and Independence Day such pleasures are in force here (of Thanksgiving he declares, "On a day to summon one's blessings and try to believe in them, it might be common sense not to risk what you're sure you have"), but they're tempered with a newfound tenderness and dissatisfaction with the schematic divisions he's heretofore applied to his life.
In this sense, The Lay of the Land reckons with encroaching obsolescence with a rueful tone not unlike Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (largely sans the running gun battles), and arrives not at some much-prized sense of contentment or acceptance (which Bascombe derides as "laughing/grimacing masks of denial"), but a remarkable, unexpected grasp of the Taoist maxim that "[a] sound man ... by never being an end in himself ... endlessly becomes himself."
To that end, the novel truly comes alive in its latter half, when Frank poignantly realizes that his assertion regarding his long-dead son in The Sportswriter—"I realized that my own mourning for [Ralph] is finally over"—is a lie. Prior to this point The Lay of the Land lacks a certain momentum, and Bascombe's travels seem more narrowly elliptical than in Independence Day and cover terrain (both literal and figurative) largely familiar from The Sportswriter.
The question isn't whether The Lay of the Land matches those books for narrative propulsion and inventive characterizations, though. It frequently does, and it often exceeds them, but what truly matters is whether this final (so Ford says) entry in the Bascombe trilogy is necessary to our understanding of Frank as both a fully rounded human being and as a bellwether of 21st-century American existence. The answer is an unequivocal yes, and I'll go even further and say that this is the best, most assured and achingly honest entry in the series.