The Lay of the Land
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Average rating3.5
It is fall, 2000 and Frank Bascombe has arrived at a state of optimistic pragmatism that he calls the Permanent Period of life. Epic mistakes have already been made, dreams downsized, and Frank reflects that now at least there are fewer opportunities left in life to get things wrong. But the tranquillity he anticipated is not to be. In fact, as Thanksgiving dinner with his children and first wife nears, the Permanent Period proves as full of possibility as life had ever been. In his third Frank Bascombe novel Richard Ford contemplates the human character with wry precision. Graceful, expansive, filled with pathos but irresistibly funny, The Lay of the Land is a modern American masterpiece.
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I'd like to buy Richard Ford a drink. In honor of Frank Bascombe, I'd like to make it an old fashioned.
I first read Richard Ford when I was far too young to appreciate him–I think I stumbled across “Independence Day” in late elementary school. I was glad to revisit him at the beach this summer.
In terms of logistics, “The Lay of the Land” is the third in a set of novels about Frank Bascombe's life (Who is he, you ask? A modern-day self-deprecating Renaissance man of a sort). The first two, “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day” (which won a Pulitzer), will go down in family history as the only two works of fiction that both of my parents have read in my entire years of being cognizant of their reading habits. So Ford's got pretty wide appeal.
The end of the trilogy is...sweeping in its attention to the minutiae of life, and our idiosyncratic and fumbling reactions to said minutiae. Which I mean in a completely excellent way. Easy description of the book's many & subtle virtues is escaping me at this point, but suffice it to say that I really, really liked it.
