Frank Bascombe, aspiring novelist, first slouched and mumbled his way into our consciousness at the height of the Reagan era in 1986. In ‘The Sportswriter’, Richard Ford’s magisterial opus, Bascombe perfectly embodied a Baby Boomer disappointed by failures of life and love, sliding despairingly into early middle age. He was a notably bewildered and stunned New Jersey Everyman whose portrayal drew comparisons with Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Arthur Miller’s Willie Loman. Bascombe was, however, his own man and had none of Angstrom’s smugness or Loman’s self-delusion. Here was a masterful portrayal of a bewildered and premature retiree from his own life, battered by divorce, the failure of his literary ambitions and the death of his young son.
The follow-up, ‘Independence Day’, won Ford the Pulitzer Prize in 1995, and took Frank Bascombe away from the safe masculine haven of sports into the real estate business. In this, the final novel of the trilogy, set in the run-up to Thanksgiving 2000, when the Presidency still hung on the whims of the Supreme Court, Bascombe is 55, and a successful realtor on the New Jersey Shoreline. In remission from prostate cancer, he has a Tibetan business partner, an ex-wife who wants him back and a daughter who has ditched her lesbian girlfriend for one of his contemporaries, all of which serves to reinforce his angst and nostalgia for a simpler America.
This zone of relative comfort is what Frank refers to as the Permanent Period of Life where ‘you realise that [you] can’t completely fuck everything up anymore, since so much of your life is on the books already [and] you’ve survived it’. The dense narrative of ‘The Lay of the Land’ resembles nothing less than an exhaustive ethnography of the last two decades of American life, but Ford’s elegiac feel for his material is never less than utterly convincing and unquestionably moving. Highly recommended.
