The Lay of the Land (Paperback)

With the publication last fall of The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford faced the usual inevitable question from interviewers: How much are he and his recurring character Frank Bascombe alike? Not at all, or some variation on that, has always been his standard replay. But you can tell the question bothers him, and that he feels he shouldn’t even have to answer it. When he does, it’s because he doesn’t have a choice. In a way, he has himself to blame. He has, in Frank Bascombe, invented a character so authentic, so adept at getting under your skin and into your head, you feel the need to ground him in a real, live person. It’s Ford’s fault, too, for bringing Frank back once again.
The Lay of the Land is the third part of a trilogy that began 20 years ago with The Sportswriter, then resumed a decade ago with Independence Day. Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award (the first time the same book had won both prizes) and had reviewers calling Ford “one of his generation’s most eloquent voices.” Separately and together the novels are a remarkable accomplishment, not just for what they are about-the elusive, never-ending American pursuit of happiness-but for the way they are about it. What all three have in common-in addition to their narrator-hero-is that they shouldn’t work. They are long, each one longer than the last, and meandering. They are thin on action and fat on Frank’s musing. (“Human interaction is the action,” Ford said of Independence Day.) That they do succeed is a testament to Ford’s talent as a prose stylist (Raymond Carver once said of Ford that “sentence for sentence, Richard is the best writer at work in this country today.”), and to his ambition and vision as a novelist. This may also explain why Ford finds the autobiographical question reductive, even impertinent.
On the subject of autobiography, Ford, who is usually all Southern charm, will talk to you like you’re a four-year old. “(Frank) is my creature. I cause him to do everything. He’s not me. But I’m his author. I authorize everything he does. He authorizes nothing,” he told one newspaper columnist. Ford has also been quick to catalogue the ways he’s not like Frank: he’s not divorced; not a real estate agent; he’s sixty-two, Frank is fifty-five; Frank has prostate cancer, Ford doesn’t. In a recent interview in The Washington Post, Ford practically explained his most celebrated literary creation out of existence. “He’s not anybody,” Ford said. “Frank is a piece of language really.”
Of course, this across-the-board disclaimer is as old as novel-writing. And, in The Lay of the Land, it’s there in its regular spot on the book’s title page, unread and unheeded like the FBI warning on a video: “This is a work of fiction . . . yadda yadda . . . Any resemblance to actual persons . . . blah blah blah . . . is entirely coincidental.” But what of those coincidences?
When we first meet Frank in The Sportswriter, he’s a former fiction writer. All the promise he had has vanished due to tragic circumstances (the death of his eldest son) and his own failings (dreaminess, divorce), and Frank has put aside the novel he has been working on to cover sports. Ford, coincidentally, found himself in the same fix for a while, writing for a sports magazine while his first two novels, The Ultimate Good Luck and A Piece of My Heart, failed to generate much traction for their up-and-coming author. He has admitted that if The Sportswriter-a departure in tone and style with its first-person narration and its East Coast suburban angst-had been a bust, he was toast. (His agent seconded the notion.) What does this prove? Not that Ford is Frank, obviously, but that the two were for a brief, soul-searching moment, on the same page.
And, really, how hard is it for a man married as long as Ford-38 years to Kristina, the name you’ll find on the dedication page of all his books-to imagine himself divorced? Or, for that matter, a man over fifty to know what it’s like to obsess over the state of his prostate? And while Ford is older than Frank, they would have been the same age in the fall of 2000 when The Lay of the Land is set.
Once he’s given up on the idea of being a writer, Frank becomes, in Independence Day and now in The Lay of the Land, a realtor, and a pretty good one. Ford has lived everywhere in the States, from New Orleans to Montana to Vermont (at present, he’s got a house in Maine), and he loves talking real estate. When I did interview him in Montreal recently and I casually complained about my place, he said, “I have owned eight houses and buying one has always made me absolutely ebullient. It’s time for you to buy another house.”
Does that remind you of anyone? Say, Frank Bascombe expounding, in The Lay of the Land, on why he does what he does: “The realty profession itself thrives on the perpetual expectation of changes for the better.”
For my part, I avoided the autobiographical question, in part because I’d had it swatted away a decade ago when I first interviewed Ford about Independence Day. Even so, I was itching to ask again. It turns out readers really are like four-year-olds. We want to be a told a story and we want to believe it completely, unquestioningly. The nuances of literature (unreliable narrators, point-of-view, voice) are not exactly lost on us, but they are also not the first thing that comes to mind. So when Ford puts as much distance as he can between Frank and him, it doesn’t quite wash. Like it or not, and I’m guessing Ford probably likes it better than he lets on, that’s his accomplishment: Frank Bascombe, like Huckleberry Finn or Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom (Frank is often linked with John Updike’s Rabbit, and while Ford appreciates the comparison, he doesn’t quite see it), is an enduring American creation. He walks among us now.
But maybe that’s also why playing autobiographical gotcha is ultimately beside the point. For all he shares with Ford, Frank is an invention, invented for a very specific reason-to show us the mistake we make when we take other human beings for granted. If we are astonished by the inner life of Frank Bascombe, a white suburban American male real estate agent, who out there won’t astonish us?
This question has always been at the heart of Ford’s plan in the Frank Bascombe novels. Although Ford has written in the third person often-mainly in his short stories-he admits he’s never felt comfortable doing it. He has, he said, a harder time creating a sense of intimacy with the reader. With first person, with a voice as authentic and affecting as Frank’s, that intimacy comes naturally. Still, that’s not the only reason he chose it.
“I intellectually and spiritually believe that all kinds of people are capable of eloquence whether they are railroad workers or sportswriters or realtors,” he explained to me. “Giving eloquent thought and giving rich interior life and giving a gift for language to characters who you may not think conventionally would have those things is, for me, really important. It’s a kind of moral gesture.”
Coincidentally, Frank has something similar to say in the new novel on the difficulty of being empathetic: “I should say straight out: never tell anyone you know how she or he feels unless you happen to be, just at that second, stabbing yourself with the very same knife in the very same place in the very same heart she or he is stabbing.”

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Tall and lanky, Ford looks like a smarter Gary Cooper, a less craggy Clint Eastwood-the strong, silent type in other words. Only he’s not silent. He will go on, eloquently, engagingly, about whatever comes up, like the reason for George Bush’s unlikely success: “Americans wanted somebody, once they cast their vote, to tell them everything was going to be all right.” Or like the Dalai Lama’s personal habits (there’s a supporting cast of screwball characters in The Lay of the Land, including Frank’s sidekick, a Republican Tibetan go-getter): “I’ve been reading a lot about the Dalai Lama lately and other than not being married, and maybe he doesn’t want to be married, he doesn’t give up much,” Ford said. “I heard him interviewed and he was asked something like, ‘Mr. Lama, what do you do of an evening?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I watch the BBC and because of certain health problems I eat a steak.’ I wanted to say, ‘And do you have a martini?’”
Early in his career, Ford was lumped in with the minimalist movement in American literature, a disciple of Ernest Hemingway by way of Raymond Carver. It was never quite true, but even if it was, it’s not anymore. Ford’s a maximalist now. The Lay of the Land is, at nearly 500 pages, a fat, juicy meditation on many things-from politics to religion-but none more so than mortality. Here’s Frank on the possibility that getting cancer has helped his sales pitch:

“Cancer itself doesn’t really make you fear the future and what might happen, it actually makes you (at least it’s made me) not as worried as you were before you had it. It might make you concerned about lousing up an individual day or wasting an afternoon . . . but not your whole life. I try to impart this hopeful view to oldsters who wander down to the Shore in their blue Chrysler New Yorkers to “look at houses,” but then get squirrelly about making a mistake, and end up scampering home… thinking that what I’ve told them is nothing but a sales pitch and I won’t be around when the shit train pulls in and the house market bottoms out . . . But once I’ve explained that it’s seashore property I’m showing them and God isn’t making any more of it . . . I just want to say: Hey! Look! Take the plunge. Live once. You’re on the short end of this stick. He isn’t making any more of you, either.”

The Lay of the Land is also a journey through contemporary America (New Jersey, to be precise) and Frank, by turns sentimental and profound, and usually hilarious, is its relentlessly chatty guide, like a suburban Huck Finn, giving us the tour not on a raft but in his Chevy Suburban SUV. “Why do so many things happen in cars?” Frank muses. “Are they the only interior life left?”
Set, as all the Bascombe books are, during an iconic American holiday (Thanksgiving this time, July Fourth and Easter the times before), Frank is having his problems-the aforementioned prostate cancer, a second wife who has gone back to her first husband, a man presumed dead for years, grown up children he can’t connect with-but he remains as optimistic as he can be, under the circumstances. There are dark shadows in the book-every act of random violence foreshadows 9/11, less than a year away-but Frank’s gift is for living a life that is examined, sure, but also mitigated; “Forward-thinking,” he calls it. From the start, Frank has had a knack for manoeuvering or, more to the point, rationalising his way around a bad situation.
For this gift, Ford makes his hapless hero pay- for example, Frank is forever doomed to deal with his troubled son Paul, who returns in The Lay of the Land as a mullet-headed, hostile greeting-card salesman. But Ford also cuts his resilient hero some slack. Once again, author and character are on the same page. “You have to accommodate things in your history that when they happened weren’t accomodatable,” Ford said. “We do terrible things some times and there they are staring us right in the face. But you just can’t go on feeling horrible for every bad thing you’ve ever done. You’d just be a miserable wretch and kill yourself. So you are negotiating all the time. And that’s okay.”
The word, okay, when Ford says it, sounds consoling, even hopeful. It just may be that Ford is more optimistic than Frank. In any case, he’s certainly more optimistic than any novelist has a right to be, especially one who’s looked as deeply and unflinchingly into the human heart as he has. How else do you explain that he, unlike Frank, loves Hallmark greeting cards? Doing research, Ford spent time at Hallmark’s head office in Kansas City. (Frank’s son, Paul, works for Hallmark.) “They let me go to story meetings. They let me write greeting cards. They let me give speeches to all of the writers, there.” Ford talked to them about acts of imagination on the page, and it may as well have been a master class. Who better to advise an audience of shlockmeisters, cheerleaders, how to really connect with readers? Just be authentic, I imagine Ford saying, if you’ve got that, you’ve got something.
With The Lay of the Land, Ford is done with Frank, or so he says. (“I thought I might just franchise him. Let someone else come along and write the next book. Like they did with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.”) The trilogy began with his wife challenging him to write about a happy character and he feels he has, in his own way, met that challenge. “The best I could come up with was someone who is trying to be happy.”
I wondered out loud, “Is that enough? Isn’t pursuing happiness bound to make a person unhappy?” Ford became defensive on his imaginary hero’s behalf: “I think that a man who is trying to be happy but who may not ever find happiness is happy in the process . . . he is privileged in the pursuit.”
This turns out to be one more coincidence: Ford also feels privileged. “Writing novels is not very pleasant,” he admitted. “You would rather be watching TV or sleeping or even doing something much more exciting. But I have dedicated myself to doing it for nearly the last 40 years so I had to decide, ipso facto, that if this is what I do all the time this must be what I like doing.”
Joel Yanofsky (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.