The Lay of the Land

Starred review from September 11, 2006
Frank Bascombe meticulously maps New Jersey with a realtor's rapacious eye, and he is an equally intense topographer of his teeming inner landscape. In the first of Ford's magisterial Bascombe novels (The Sportswriter
, 1986), Frank staved off feelings of loss and regret with a dissociated "dreaminess." He graduated to a more conventional detachment during what he calls the "Existence Period" of the Pen/Faulkner and Pulitzer Prize–winning Independence Day
(1995). Now we find the 55-year-old former fiction writer and sports journalist in a "Permanent Period," a time of being, not becoming. He's long adjusted to the dissolution of his first marriage to women's golf instructor Ann Dykstra (which foundered 17 years earlier after the death of their nine-year-old, firstborn son, Ralph) and settled for eight years with second wife Sally Caldwell in Sea-Clift, N.J. Permanence has proven turbulent: Sally has abandoned Frank for her thought-to-be-dead first husband, and Frank's undergone treatment for prostate cancer.
The novel's action unfolds in 2000 over the week before Thanksgiving, as Frank bemoans the contested election, mourns the imminent departure of Clinton ("My President," he says) and anticipates with measured ambivalence the impending holiday meal: his guests will include his 27-year-old son, Paul, a once-troubled adolescent grown into an abrasive "mainstreamer," who writes for Hallmark in Kansas City, Mo., and his 25-year-old daughter, Clarissa, a glamorous bisexual Harvard grad who's unfailingly loyal to her dad. Frank's quotidian routines are punctuated by weird but subtly depicted events: he happens on the scene of a bombing at the hospital in his former hometown of Haddam, N.J., clenches his jaw through an awkward meeting with Ann, provokes a bar fight and observes the demolition of an old building.
But the real dramatic arc occurs in Frank's emotional life—until the climax takes him out of his head. Ford summons a remarkable voice for his protagonist—ruminant, jaunty, merciless, generous and painfully observant—building a dense narrative from Frank's improvisations, epiphanies and revisions. His reluctance to "fully occupy
" his real estate career ("it's really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about") illuminates the preoccupations of the boomer generation; for Frank, an unwritten novel and broken relationships combine with the dwindling fantasy of endless possibility—in work and in love—to breed doubt: "Is this it?" and "Am I good?" Frank wonders. The answers don't come easy. 150,000 announced first printing.

October 15, 2006
In 1985, Ford published "The Sportswriter" and with protagonist Frank Bascombe began an epic story of the everyman. Ten years later, Bascombe returned in Fords" Independence Day", winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a feat never before accomplished by a single work of fiction. Here, Ford revisits the story in 2000, as Bascombe deals with prostate cancer, his second divorce, and the controversial presidential election fiasco. He has moved to the Jersey shore, where he sells real estate and, over the course of 500 pages, does nothing particularly important except host a postnuclear family Thanksgiving get-together to which, against his better judgment, he has invited his ex-wife and emotionally explosive son. But, as in many literary classics, the beauty of this novel is in its presentationthe word choice and perfect phrasesand in Bascombes unwaveringly honest and humorous narration. Ford manages to become his character and remove authorial boundaries, transforming his novel into a story told to us by an old friend. A fitting way to complete the Frank Bascombe legacy; recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 6/1/06.]"Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2006
Ford's third novel featuring realtor Frank Bascombe, previously seen in " he Sportswriter " (1986)" " and the Pulitzer-winning I" ndependence Day " (1995), finds the beleaguered everyman in the "Permanent Period" of his life, where he's trying mightily to deal with present circumstances while dodging past regrets. But it's Thanksgiving week, "the time of year when things go wrong if they're going to." Frank has recently been diagnosed and is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer; his second wife has left him for her first husband (presumed dead but recently resurrected); his long-divorced first wife has suddenly (and disturbingly) expressed an interest in getting back together; and his fractious relationship with his son is soon to be tested anew as the family gathers for an organic-turkey dinner. As Frank struggles to hold onto his peace of mind, events both large and small conspire to give him an "acute case of the heebie-jeebies." A barroom brawl with a drunken florist, a real-estate deal gone sour, and an unexpected, intense bout of grieving for his first child, who died at age nine--Frank suddenly finds himself just where he doesn't want to be, mired "in the meaning of every goddamn thing." Through Frank's acerbic opinions on a host of issues, from the presidential election of 2000 to the real-estate business, friendship, and the "treacherous" nature of holidays, Ford crafts a mesmerizing narrative voice--one that gives us, with offhanded eloquence and a kind of grim mirth, "the lay of the land." (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)