By Richard Ford
484 pages
Available at Powerbooks
Holidays can be times of unexpected turmoil, even disaster. Take Frank Bascombe, the fictional realtor in Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, the third installment in a trilogy of novels, each set a decade apart. In Frank’s first outing, The Sportswriter (1986), he is hit on by a sexually confused Divorced Men’s Club member who later commits suicide during Easter week. In 1986’s Independence Day (for which Ford won a Pulitzer Prize), Frank decides to take his troubled teen son on a tour of American sports museums over Fourth of July weekend – and ends up beaning the kid in the eye with a baseball.
Now, meet Frank, circa 2000, on the eve of George W. Bush’s (first) election. No longer a sportswriter or a crafter of short stories, the 55-year-old Frank sells real estate, growing slowly rich off of beachfront property in New Jersey, and tends to his prostate cancer (he has radioactive pellets implanted in his scrotum, part of chemotherapy). It’s almost Thanksgiving Day, Turkey Day in America, and you just know from past experience that this will not be a time of smooth sailing for Frank Bascombe.
His son, Paul, the one who was injured by the baseball, is now a sardonic writer of Hallmark greeting cards in Kansas City. His daughter Clarissa, a Harvard graduate, is a sometime lesbian who is also visiting dad for the weekend.
Frank has a Tibetan associate realtor who is thinking about quitting to go into property development; he has an ex-wife who inexplicably declares that she still loves him (he does not feel the same); and he has a current wife who’s run off to Scotland with her former husband, a Vietnam vet who was legally declared deceased, but who suddenly pops up again, like a confused amnesiac in a TV soap opera, 18 years after abandoning her.
With so much on his mind, Frank does little in the novel besides drive around and think: he ruminates over the past, he talks about his current situation, he offers his theories on life ("Other people, in fact – if you keep the numbers small – are not always hell"; "About some things, even men can’t be wrong"), and he gives a pulse reading of America at a certain moment frozen in time – right before 9/11.
In other words, The Lay of the Land is not a plot-driven page-turner. But in the hands of Richard Ford, the first-person prose of Frank is riveting, thoughtful, digressive, funny, and full of what-the-hell energy that makes Bascombe one of the most believable – if not reliable – characters in modern fiction. Readers will also detect a recurring note of despair in his ruminations on American existence.
It’s not easy to sum up the story, which simply tracks Frank from errand to errand over a single weekend – visiting a wake, showing homes to several clients, watching the scheduled implosion of an old hotel to make way for new property (one of several events in the book that seem to foreshadow 9/11), and visiting a local resident in need of a Sponsor. As a cancer patient, Frank finds it helpful to join a group of volunteers called "Sponsors" who visit ordinary citizens at their homes, offering common-sense advice to those grappling with life’s questions. One of the recurring questions facing people, Frank finds, is the same question that faced many Americans right after 9/11: Are we basically good? Or are we assholes? It’s a question Frank seems to want to lay to rest on the "basically good" side.
During his errands, Frank encounters lots of immigrants seeking their own piece of turf in New Jersey, including (naturally) a group of Filipinos he encounters happily roasting hot dogs at a beach barbecue one chilly November day. Not just Filipinos (who do well in business, Frank notes), but Mexicans, Tibetans, Indians, Pakistanis and a whole new wave of immigrants are changing the character of the United States, which will eventually change its rules, if not its values and beliefs.
Another ruminative matter is the nature of happiness. Being a realtor, Frank is a realist:
Real life is different and can’t be appraised as simply "happy" but only in terms of "Yes, I’ll take it all, thanks," or "No, I believe I won’t." Happy, as my poor father used to say, is a lot of hooey. Happy is a circus clown, a sitcom, a greeting card. Life, though, life’s about something sterner. But also something better. A lot better.
But in his travels up and down the Jersey coast, Frank gets into bigger and bigger spots of trouble – a bombing at a hospital that he is visiting, an unexpected bar fight, a broken rear window in his Chevy Suburban – and readers will discern that Frank, as Salinger’s Mr. Antolini might say, is "riding for a fall." Bad news seems right around the corner, and when he takes an unpleasant phone call from his ex-wife, Frank praises the inventor of the telephone for making face-to-face contact unnecessary. ("Hats off to Alexander Graham Bell – great American – who foresaw how human we are and how much protection we need from others.")
We get hints of danger – imminent trouble is red-flagged throughout the book – yet when real violence does make its final, blunt appearance, it has a cataclysmic effect.
Along the way, faithful readers of Ford’s trilogy may come to suspect that Frank has, to some degree, become an asshole. A crotchety air surrounds his observations on, say, immigrants, and his relentless philosophizing seems a bit like whistling in the dark – though cancer and thoughts of mortality are probably the reason. His homilies and wry insights still hit home, but he may have become, over the years, an unreliable narrator, someone whose words, which we’ve followed for a combined 1,300 or so pages since The Sportswriter, might turn out to be as hollow and superficial as those of a man trying to peddle us a house. But this is part of the danger and thrill of fiction: to be swept along by a convincing narrative, to hang on to every word, never quite knowing where it’s all heading, or if it will all hold together at the end. Ford is still an engaging salesman of the American experience.