The Lay of the Land

After two short-story collections, Ford returns to the familiar ground trod by Frank Bascombe, the middle-aged narrator who first appeared in the heartbreaking novels The Sportswriter and Independence Day.

Bascombe, who previously wrote for Sports Illustrated, now sells real estate in south New Jersey with a Tibetan associate named Mike Mahoney (it’s a long story) helping him out. It’s Thanksgiving weekend in 2000, and the divorce and remarried Bascombe morosely contemplates the way not-yet-President Bush is stealing the election from Al Gore.

Despite what happens to Bascombe in the course of the novel—his second wife leaves him for a husband who’d been presumed dead; his daughter is arrested for car theft; he gets drunk in a lesbian bar; a bomb explodes in the local hospital; a client is attacked by a fox hiding in a house he’s selling; and Bascombe himself is shot in the chest—he maintains a reverent, dimly optimistic outlook. He’s 55 and in what he calls the Permanent Period, the Existence Period having been covered in Independence Day.

Lay is probably more palatable after reading the earlier novels. Bascombe’s running inner commentary is easier to take when you know what you’re wading into. Ford’s loose-limbed prose rolls gently along, but resonates more when it’s not encountered midstream.—Marc Geelhoed