Product Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Best Book of the Year

A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father –Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13943 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-24
• Released on: 2007-07-24
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com
After more than a decade, Richard Ford revives Frank Bascombe, the beloved protagonist from The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Fans will be scrambling for The Lay of the Land, a novel that finds Bascombe contending with health, marital, and familial issues wake of the 2000 presidential election. We asked Richard Ford to tell us a little more about what it's like to create (and share so much time with) a character like Frank. Read his short essay below. --Daphne Durham

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Richard Ford on Frank Bascombe

I never think of the characters I write as exactly people, the way some writers say they do, letting their characters "just take over and write the book;" or for that matter, in the way I want readers to think of them as people, or even as I think of characters in novels I myself read (and didn't write). In my own books I do all the writing--the characters don't. And for me to think of them as people, instead of as figures made of language, would make my characters less subject to the useful and necessary changes that occur as I grow in my own awareness about them as I make them up. Writing a character for twenty-five years and for three novels, as I have written about Frank Bascombe, has meant that Frank has, of course, become a presence in my life (and a welcome one). When I wrote Independence Day I began with the belief that Frank was pretty much the same character and presence he was in The Sportswriter. But when I went back later and read parts of The Sportswriter, I found that the sentences Frank "spoke" and that filled that second book were longer, more complex, and actually contained more nitty experience than the first book. This has also been true of The Lay of the Land: longer sentences, more experience to reconcile and transact, more words required to make lived life seem accessible. You could say that Frank had simply changed as we all do. But practically speaking--as his author--what this makes me think is that I've had to make up Frank up newly each time, and have not exactly "gone back" and "found" him--although Frank's history from the previous books has certainly needed to be kept in sight and made consistent. What is finally consistent to me about Frank is that I "hear" language I associate with him, and it is language that pleases me, with which I and he can (if I'm a good enough writer) represent life in an intelligent and hopeful and buoyant spirit a reader can make use of. --Richard Ford

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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Frank Bascombe, Ford's former fiction writer and sports journalist who we have seen age and change since Ford introduced him in 1986's The Sportswriter, must be one of the most difficult fictional characters to bring to audio life. His moods and mindsets shift like the shores of his native New Jersey, where at 55 he now sells real estate, and keeping them clear and credible requires a reader of subtle and impeccable judgment. Barrett, a veteran stage, film and television actor, has a voice that should make listeners think they're hearing Frank tell his own story. He catches every nuance from the odd to the tragic, making the breakup of two marriages, a life-threatening disease and the disappointment over a son's career choice as vital a part of Bascombe's story as his strange mental journeys, which are often triggered by headlines or TV news items. A sharp, revealing interview with author Ford is part of this very large, extremely important audio package.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Holidays can be tough, all right; just ask Frank Bascombe. In The Sportswriter (1986), the novel in which Richard Ford introduced us to his introspective American everyman, Easter cruelly resurrected memories of Frank's dead son, his broken marriage and his aborted literary career. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning follow-up, Independence Day (1995), a Fourth of July weekend getaway came to an abrupt halt when an accident befell Frank's surviving son moments after father and child had bitterly fought. The compulsory, half-hearted reflection inspired by most holidays stands in stark contrast to Frank's version, which is hard-won and sincere. And in his own discursive way, Frank always manages to find the kernel of significance at each holiday's core -- the miraculous possibility of a second chance, for instance, or the gratefulness one feels to live in a country where second chances aren't just tolerated but encouraged.

In The Lay of the Land, the eagerly awaited third installment in the Bascombe saga, Ford invites us to spend Thanksgiving with the 55-year-old Frank, who is still selling New Jersey real estate (as he did in Independence Day, having long ago given up the writing life), though he has moved from the picturesque suburb of Haddam to the grittier Jersey Shore town of Sea-Clift. At first glance, it doesn't seem as if Frank has too much to be thankful for. His second wife, Sally, has just left him for her first husband, who has magically reappeared after being presumed dead for decades. A bout with cancer has left Frank with "sixty radioactive iodine seeds encased in titanium BBs and smart-bombed into my prostate." His visiting daughter has brought with her a new paramour Frank hates; his visiting son seethes with bottled-up resentment. And on top of all that, it looks as if the Supreme Court is about to hand the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, a scenario that Frank finds almost as dispiriting as spousal abandonment and life-threatening illness.

Through it all, he's doing his best to remain philosophical, hewing to the rules of what he calls his "Permanent Period," that span of late middle age when "very little you say comes in quotes, when few contrarian voices mutter doubts in your head, when the past seems more generic than specific, when life's a destination more than a journey and when who you feel yourself to be is pretty much how people will remember you once you've croaked -- in other words, when personal integration . . . is finally achieved." Though reasonably effective as a prophylactic against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the Permanent Period and its stoical precepts aren't foolproof, and Frank knows it. "It's loony, of course, to think that by lowering expectations and keeping ambitions to a minimum we can ever avert the surprising and unwanted," he confesses.

Ford's amazing trick here is in coaxing out all that's spectacular in the rather unspectacular stops that make up a New Jersey real-estate agent's itinerary. The Lay of the Land's first 200 pages describe the ordinary events of a single day, in which Frank's "quest" amounts to nothing more than accompanying his colleague to a potential development site, attending the funeral-home viewing of a deceased friend, performing his duty as a volunteer mentor, visiting his ex-wife at her workplace and getting his dental night guard adjusted. And yet in these same 200 pages Ford once again shows why he deserves to be hailed as one of the great American novelists of his generation and why Frank Bascombe deserves a spot on the modern American fictional-character roster, alongside John Updike's Harry Angstrom, Walker Percy's Binx Bolling and Saul Bellow's Augie March.

In Ford's hands, every one of Frank's mundane errands is pregnant with revelatory potential. Anyone who has ever come to some profound conclusion about the human condition while stuck in traffic or waiting in line at the post office will immediately grasp what the author is doing here: reminding us that even the smallest and most insignificant-seeming of our experiences can trigger the cascade of memories, feelings and observations that combine to form genuine insight.

Frank's insights aren't just flashy aperçus meant to impress before fading away forever; they actually accrete, as if they're being stored in preparation for some explosive moment when he will need all the wisdom he can muster just to survive. And as it happens, that climactic moment always arrives at the end of each Bascombe novel, when Frank is tested by one of those "surprising and unwanted" exigencies that he knows, deep down, can't be averted. In The Lay of the Land, it's a bona fide shocker, though Frank handles it with his characteristic mix of laconic good humor and philosophical equilibrium. He's like Clint Eastwood and William James rolled up into one.

It's probably time we all just accepted that Ford isn't going to do anything about certain tics, such as his jarring references to "Negroes" and "Chinamen" (as if he were writing in 1961), or the manner in which his interlocutors constantly address each other by name when conversing. (Does anybody really do that outside of novels and infomercials?) And it's true that spending long stretches of time with Frank in his hyper-ruminative mode can come to feel a little like "My Dinner With Polonius." Even his friends think so -- one of them, a crotchety old-timer named Wade (some readers will remember him from The Sportswriter) admonishes him: "You're a nunce, you know that? You like being a nunce. You get to do a lot of good thinking that way."

Ford is more aware of the problem than his creation is, and he occasionally drops wry hints that the overexamined life can be just as troublesome as the unexamined one. But it's a testament to Ford's mastery that we never tire of Frank's company. Whether we're battling rush-hour traffic with him, joining him for a few highballs while his car is in the shop, accompanying him on a client visit or just listening in while he returns some phone calls, we always feel lucky to hang out with him and hear what he has to say. Frank Bascombe -- a divorced, middle-aged New Jersey real-estate agent with health problems, kid problems, ex-wife problems and a deep, submerged grief that erupts volcanically from time to time -- has become our unlikely Virgil, guiding us through the modern American purgatory of big-box stores along frontage roads, slowly decaying town squares and leafy, secret-harboring suburbs. He's there to remind us that glimmering meaning is hiding everywhere, even in the ugliest or most banal of places.

Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

Best Frank Bascombe
This is, to my way of thinking, the best of the 3 Frank Bascombe novels. Frank is now all "growed up" and facing the inevitabilities of late middle age (he's 55): prostrate cancer, ungrateful or at least emotionally angular children, possible failure of a second marriage and re-connection of a first, perhaps early retirement. Frank remains one of the great creations of modern fiction, precisely for what he is not -- heroic, existentially confused, depressed, or captured by a mid-life hormone surge. He's a real human, better than most, but not without flaws; the kind of person I'd like for a friend. He's nothing to excess: intelligent but casually so, kind but capable of the occasional cruelty, wealthy but not showy, and despite all of the above not the least bit boring. After all, you gotta love a guy who can feel entirely comfortable and happy getting drunk in a lesbian bar and be able to express guiltless anger at a sorry-for-himself, vaguely dysfunctional son who blames his father for his unhappiness. I stress the character because the plot isn't much -- to be sure things happen, ordinary things really (Frank's days are filled with more bits and pieces of pastel drama than mine, but still not earth-shaking). His philosophical musings on his life's conditions are interesting, sophisticated, and often wryly funny, and it is his interior life that is the subject of the novel. Wordy? Yes and perhaps 50 pages too long. I tend to be a fast reader and sometimes (to my regret) skip over material that doesn't move a plot along. This book requires considerable attention for maximum benefit, and I found myself rereading some passages, in part to be sure I hadn't missed anything important and in part because the writing really is quite lovely, even poetic (if a low-key way). For those of us who enjoyed the first two novels, this is a must-read. It is certainly possible to read this without having done the first two, but some of the richness of Frank's life would be lost. One of the best books I have read in the past 5 years or so, and I'm hoping we'll be a 4th Bascombe novel. Highly recommended but not for those who are impatient or favor plot over character.

Brilliantly rendered audiobook
The Lay of the Land


No need to rehash the storyline or gist of this excellent novel. Just a strong recommendation for the audiobook version, which is brilliantly rendered by Joe Barrett. Mr Barrett brings to life the entire persona of protagonist Frank Bascomb with a sympathy and sensitivity that is rarely found with such profundity in audiobooks. Indeed, the audiobook version may be in some ways preferable to the written page, particularly in working through Ford's denser prose common to some of Frank's introspective ruminations. Some readers may 'lose the string' while reading these passages--this is a book that takes some work, but is well worth it.

ulysses in new jersey
Frank Bascomb, Richard Ford's New Jersey real estate agent, is an old soul, part Greek Ulysses, part Leopold Bloom, part Underground Man, but he is also a totally contemporary guy. For three days before Thanksgiving we're on the road with this very unique mind, interacting with the rest of humanity and in particular, the American cultural scene. Hilarious and depressing, Frank is ultimately one of the most memorable and sympathetic characters in literature. This one's in the top 10; okay, top 20.