The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford

From Barnes & Noble

Richard Ford's first novel in over a decade is by definition a major literary event. Lay of the Land continues the arc begun in The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995), following the trail of everyman Frank Bascombe. The novel opens in November 2000, in days of hanging chads and uncertain futures. As Bascombe contemplates his own life, he grapples with his own uncertainties, especially issues of health and family and marriage. The author's deep engagement with his main character is apparent as you read this funny, wise, and thoroughly heartening book.

From the Publisher

With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that ten years later—after Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award—was hailed by The Times of London as “an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.” Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to life’s endless complexities than ever before.

His story resumes in the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving, permitting him to revel in the acceptance of “that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person’s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world—if it makes note at all—knows of me, how I’m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that’s wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion.” But as a Presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him along with crises both marital and medical, Frank discovers that what he terms the Permanent Period is fraught with unforeseen perils: “All the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies.”

A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forget—at once hilarious, harrowing, surprising, and profound. The Lay of the Land is astonishing in its own right and a magnificent expansion of one of the most celebrated chronicles of our time.

The New York Times - A. O. Scott

The novel’s lovely last sentence evokes "our human scale upon the land," and that touch of grandiloquence is well earned. By now, we have gotten to know Frank Bascombe well enough to take his measure, and to appreciate that, like almost no one else in our recent literature, he’s life-size.

The Washington Post - Jeff Turrentine

… 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.

Publishers Weekly

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. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 11). (Nov.)

Library Journal

In 1985, Ford published The Sportswriter and with protagonist Frank Bascombe began an epic story of the everyman. Ten years later, Bascombe returned in Ford's 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 presentation the word choice and perfect phrases and in Bascombe's 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 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The third and most eventful novel in the Frank Bascombe series takes a whiplash turn from comedy (occasionally slapstick) toward tragedy. Every ten years or so, Ford returns to Bascombe, whose debut in The Sportswriter (1986) provided the author's popular breakthrough and whose encore in Independence Day (1995) merited the Pulitzer. Where there were considerable differences between the first novel and the follow-up-in which the once-promising writer and aspiring novelist settles for a comfortable living as a real-estate agent-the third sticks closer to the second's template. Once again, Frank ruminates on his existence over an extended holiday, in this case Thanksgiving 2000, when the country is in the midst of millennial tremors and a contested presidential election. It seems that neither death nor divorce may be permanent in Bascombe's life. He is now separated from his second wife, who had presumably been a widow, but whose first husband returns to the scene, while Frank's first wife (now widowed by her second husband) gives signs that she wants to reconcile with him. His son and daughter are now adults, with complicated adult problems and relations with their parents. Frank has moved from Haddam, N.J., a suburb much changed by gentrification and cultural diversity, to a resort community on the shore, where he now sells homes and cottages with a Tibetan refugee, a Buddhist who has Americanized his name as Mike Mahoney. At the age of 55, Frank also suffers from prostate cancer, which has brought him to the autumn of his years (hence, Thanksgiving) earlier than most. As always, Frank prefers to react than act, to roll with the punches thrown by those who wish he were someone other thanwho he is. Over the course of three days culminating in a holiday dinner, he absorbs more punches than at any other time in his life. Though not as consistently compelling as Independence Day (too many chickens coming home to roost), this reaffirms that Frank Bascombe is for Ford what Rabbit Angstrom is for Updike. First printing of 150,000. Agent: Amanda Urban/International Creative Management (ICM)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

1. What do you make of the story that opens the novel: that of the community college teacher who, before being gunned down by one of her disgruntled students, was asked if she was ready to meet her maker and replied "Yes. Yes, I think I am" [p. 3]. Why is Frank so riveted by this question? How does he think he might answer in similar circumstances? What does he mean when he says that "It’s not a question . . . that suburban life regularly poses to us. Suburban life, in fact, pretty much does the opposite" [p. 4]? Is he right? How do the themes of death, self-accounting, and the terrifying randomness of the American berserker recur throughout The Lay of the Land?

2. What does Bascombe mean by the "Permanent Period?" When does he seem to have entered it, and what events threaten to evict him from it? How serious is he when he speaks of its pleasures? In the scheme of this novel, is permanence the same thing as happiness? As resignation?

3. The Lay of the Land is set during Thanksgiving, as The Sportswriter takes place at Easter and Independence Day over a July 4th weekend. How does the holiday figure in the novel? How does Frank feel about it, and how do the other characters appear to be celebrating it? Discuss the novel’s exploration of themes like gratitude, family, and abundance — as well as the ambiguous meaning of "pilgrim."

4. What role does politics play in this novel, which occurs during the long, inconclusive hangover of the 2000 presidential election? How does Frank feel about the nation’s current state of affairs? How do the other characters feel, and to whatextent are they characterized by their politics? How does the outcome (or non-outcome) of the vote mirror events in Frank’s personal life?

5. What has prompted Frank to become a Sponsor, a member of a group "whose goal is nothing more than to help people" [p. 12]? What sort of help does he have in mind, and how does that correspond to what is actually asked of him on his one Sponsorial visit? What does he get from his voluntarism, and how do the services he performs as a Sponsor compare to his kindnesses as a friend, business partner, father, or husband? How do they highlight his failings and deficiencies? What does the very existence of an organization like Sponsors suggest about American — or at least New Jerseyan — society in the year 2000?

6. What is the significance of Frank’s career as a realtor? Which of his character traits does it bring into relief? How does it cause him to see the landscape and houses around him, and how does it cause other characters to see him? What does "home" mean to a realtor, who makes his living selling them? What might "home" mean to Frank’s partner Mike Mahoney (né Lobsang Dhargey), whose original one was in Tibet? Is home, as Frank can’t keep from going back to, though the air there’s grown less breathable, the future’s over, where they really don’t want you back, and where you once left on a breeze without a rearward glance" [p. 14]?

7. Mike Mahoney’s name, career-track, and politics suggest a core sample of the American bedrock, except that, as previously mentioned, he happens to be a Buddhist from Tibet. Has the American archetype become someone who was once somebody (or something) else? In what ways are Mike and Frank similar? Are Ford’s characters constantly becoming new people or simply building additions onto an original structure? And, if Mike represents a paradigm in this novel, what do you make of Ann’s statement, "We just have to be who we are" [p. 377]?

8. Frank is a cancer survivor, a category whose ambiguity may be surpassed only by the "suicide survivors" that so confuse Mike. How does Frank feel about his condition, and particularly about where it has chosen to turn up in his body?

9. What sort of father is Frank? Which of his surviving children does he favor and for what reasons? To what extent is he still haunted by the death of his first son? Why is he so unnerved when Clarissa, who only yesterday was a straightforward lesbian, brings home a male "friend"? What might account for Frank’s embarrassment and irritation toward his son Paul and Paul’s occasional fury at him? Is Paul right when he accuses his father of "hold[ing] everything . . . down" [p. 396]?

10. How does Frank relate to the women in his life? What sort of husband has he been? How does he react to Ann’s admission that she still loves him? How has he dealt with his desertion by Sally, and to what extent may he have been complicit in it? (What might it mean when your wife leaves you for a dead man?) What do you make of his Sponsorial call to Marguerite Purcell and of the fact that it transpires without either person alluding to their long-ago sexual fling?

11. For all his relationships, Bascombe seems to be a fundamentally solitary figure. Is this because Ford embeds us so deeply in his consciousness that we experience the essential aloneness that is the hallmark of all consciousness or because Frank really is solitary? What traits or circumstances might make him so?

12. As its title suggests, The Lay of the Land is very much a novel about place. How does Bascombe view his neck of New Jersey? How do his observations about strip malls, McMansions, road houses, and human tissue banks illuminate Bascombe’s character? How do they comment on the novel’s action? Does Bascombe loathe the uniformity and ugliness of this environment, or are his feelings about them more complex? Are the author’s? What is the significance of the fox that appears in one of the book’s final scenes?

13. E. M. Forster famously summed up the difference between story and plot as follows: "'The King died, then the Queen died' is the story. 'The King died, then the Queen died of grief' is the plot" [Aspects of the Novel, chapter 5]. What is it that makes the seemingly haphazard events in this novel cohere into a plot? What is the relation between that plot’s hinges (Frank’s cancer, Sally’s departure, Ann’s confession, Clarissa’s disappearance, and Paul’s arrival, not to mention the shattering denouement) and its seemingly incidental moments?

14. Frank is both the novel’s protagonist and its narrator. Every perception and event is filtered through his voice. How would you characterize Frank’s voice? In what ways does it combine the casual and the literary, the comic and the tragic?

15. Because The Lay of the Land deals with ordinary people engaged in ordinary life in an environment that most readers will find familiar, it is tempting to see it as a miniaturist novel. But its length, its eventfulness, and the sheer, exuberant density of its observations suggest that it is also a work of fictional maximalism like Bellow’s Herzog or Joyce’s Ulysses (to which it sometimes alludes). Discuss these approaches to fiction and the ways that Ford reconciles, or navigates, between them.

Read an Excerpt

Read a Sample Chapter

The Lay of the Land

Knopf

Chapter One

New rows of three-storey white-and-pink condos line the mainland shore north and south. Farther up toward Silver Bay and the state wetlands, where bald eagles perch, the low pale-green cinder-block human-cell laboratory owned by a supermarket chain sits alongside a white condom factory owned by Saudis. At this distance, each looks as benign as Sears. And each, in fact, isa good-neighbor clean- industry-partner whose employees and executives send their kids to the local schools and houses of worship. Management puts a stern financial foot down on drugs and pedophiles. Their campuses are well landscaped and policed. Both stabilize the tax base and provide locals a few good yuks.

From the bridge span I can make out the Toms River yacht basin, a forest of empty masts wagging in the breezes, and to the north, a smooth green water tower risen behind the husk of an old nuclear plant currently for sale and scheduled for shutdown in 2002. This is our eastern land view across from the Boro of Sea-Clift, and frankly it is a positivist's version of what landscape-seascape has mostly become in a multi-use society.

This morning, I'm driving from Sea-Clift, where I've abided the last eight years, across the sixty-five-mile inland trek over to Haddam, New Jersey, where I once lived for twenty, for a day of diverse duties-some sobering, some fearsome, one purely hopeful. At 12:30, I'm paying a funeral-home visitation to my friend Ernie McAuliffe, who died on Saturday. At four, my former wife, Ann Dykstra, has asked to "meet" me at the school where she works, the prospect of which has ignited piano-wire anxiety as to the possible subjects-my health, her health, our two grown and worrisome children, the surprise announcement of a new cavalier in her life (an event ex-wives feel the need to share). I also mean to make a quick stop by my dentist's for an on-the-fly adjustment to my night guard (which I've brought). And I have a Sponsor appointment at two-which is the hopeful part.

Sponsors is a network of mostly central New Jersey citizens-men and women-whose goal is nothing more than to help people (female Sponsors claim to come at everything from a more humanistic/nurturing angle, but I haven't noticed that in my own life). The idea of Sponsoring is that many people with problems need nothing more than a little sound advice from time to time-not problems you'd visit a shrink for, or take drugs to cure, or that requires a program Blue Cross would co-pay. Just something you can't quite figure out by yourself, and that won't exactly go away, but that if you could just have a common-sense conversation about, you'd feel a helluva lot better. A good example would be that you own a sailboat but aren't sure how to sail it very well. And after a while you realize you're reluctant even to get in the damn thing for fear of sailing it into some rocks, endangering your life, losing your investment and embittering yourself with embarrassment. Meantime it's sitting in gaspingly expensive dry dock at Brad's Marina in Shark River, suffering subtle structural damage from being out of the water too long, and you're becoming the butt of whispered dumb-ass-novice cracks and slurs by the boatyard staff. You end up never driving down there even when you want to, and instead find yourself trying to avoid ever thinking about your sailboat, like a murder you committed decades ago and have escaped prosecution for by moving to another state and adopting a new identity, but that makes you feel ghastly every morning at four o'clock when you wake up covered with sweat.

Sponsor conversations address just such problems, often focusing on the debilitating effects of ill-advised impulse purchases or bad decisions regarding property or personal services. As a realtor, I know a lot about these things. Another example would be how do you approach your Dutch housekeeper, Bettina, who's stopped cleaning altogether and begun sitting in the kitchen all day drinking coffee, smoking, watching TV and talking on the telephone long-distance, but you can't figure out how to get her on track, or worst case, send her packing. Sponsor advice would be what a friend would say: Get rid of the boat, or else take some private lessons at the yacht club next spring; probably nothing's all that wrong with it for the time being-these things are built to last. Or I'll write out a brief speech for the Sponsoree to deliver to Bettina or leave in the kitchen, which, along with a healthy check, will send her on her way without fuss. She's probably illegal and unhappy herself.

Anybody with a feet-on-the-ground idea of what makes sense in the world can offer advice like this. Yet it's surprising the number of people who have no friends they can ask sound advice from, and no capacity to trust themselves. Things go on driving them crazy even though the solution's usually as easy as tightening a lug nut.

The Sponsor theory is: We offer other humans the chance to be human; to seek and also to find. No donations (or questions) asked.

A drive across the coastal incline back to Haddam is not at all unusual for me. Despite my last decade spent happily on the Shore, despite a new wife, new house, a new professional address-Realty-Wise Associates-despite a wholly reframed life, I've kept my Haddam affiliations alive and relatively thriving. A town you used to live in signifies something-possibly interesting-about you: what you were once. And what you were always has its private allures and comforts. I still, for instance, keep my Haddam Realty license current and do some referrals and appraisals for United Jersey, where I know most of the officers. For a time, I owned (and expensively maintained) two rental houses, though I sold them in the late-nineties gentrification boom. And for several years, I sat on the Governor's Board of the Theological Institute-that is, until fanatical Fresh Light Koreans bought the whole damn school, changed the name to the Fresh Light Seminary (salvation through studied acts of discipline) and I was invited to retire. I've also kept my human infrastructure (medical- dental) centered in Haddam, where professional standards are indexed to the tax base. And quite frankly, I often just find solace in the leaf-shaded streets, making note of this change or that improvement, what's been turned into condos, what's on the market at what astronomical price, where historical streets have been revectored, buildings torn down, dressed up, revisaged, as well as silently viewing (mostly from my car window) the familiar pale faces of neighbors I've known since the seventies, grown softened now and re-charactered by time's passage.

Of course, at some unpredictable but certain moment, I can also feel a heavy curtain-closing sensation all around me; the air grows thin and dense at once, the ground hardens under my feet, the streets yawn wide, the houses all seem too new, and I get the williwaws. At which instant I turn tail, switch on my warning blinkers and beat it back to Sea-Clift, the ocean, the continent's end and my chosen new life- happy not to think about Haddam for another six months.

What is home then, you might wonder? The place you first see daylight, or the place you choose for yourself? Or is it the someplace you just can't keep from going back to, though the air there's grown less breathable, the future's over, where they really don't want you back, and where you once left on a breeze without a rearward glance? Home? Home's a musable concept if you're born to one place, as I was (the syrup-aired southern coast), educated to another (the glaciated mid-continent), then come full stop in a third-spending years finding suitable "homes" for others. Home may only be where you've memorized the grid pattern, where you can pay with a check, where someone you've already met takes your blood pressure, palpates your liver, slips a digit here and there, measures the angstroms gone off your molars bit by bit-in other words, where your primary care-givers await, their pale gloves already pulled on and snugged.

My other duty for the morning is to act as ad hoc business adviser and confidant to my realty associate Mike Mahoney, about whom some personal data would be noteworthy.

Mike hails from faraway Gyangze, Tibet (the real Tibet, not the one in Ohio), and is a five-foot-three-inch, forty-three-year-old realty dynamo with the standard Tibetan's flat, bony-cheeked, beamy Chinaman's face, gun-slit eyes, abbreviated arm length and, in his case, skint black hair through which his beige scalp glistens. "Mike Mahoney" was the "American" name hung on him by coworkers at his first U.S. job at an industrial-linen company in Carteret-his native name, Lobsang Dhargey, being thought by them too much of a word sandwich. I've told him that one or the other-Mike Lobsang or Mike Dhargey-could be an interesting fillip for business. But Mike's view is that after fifteen years he's adjusted to Mike Mahoney and likes being "Irish." He has, in fact, become a full-blooded, naturalized American-at the courthouse in Newark with four hundred others. Still it's easy to picture him in a magenta robe and sandals, sporting a yellow horn hat and blowing a ceremonial trumpet off the craggy side of Mount Qomolangma-which is often how I think of him, though he never did it. You'd be right to say I never in a hundred years expected to have a Tibetan as my realty associate, and that New Jersey homebuyers might turn skittish at the idea. But at least about the second of these, what might be true is not. In the year and a half he's worked for me, since walking through my Realty-Wise door and asking for a job, Mike has turned out to be a virtual lion of revenue generation and business savvy: unceasingly farming listings, showing properties, exhibiting cold-call tenacity while proving artful at coaxing balky offers, wheedling acceptances, schmoozing with buyers, keeping negotiating parties in the dark, fast-tracking loan applications and getting money into our bank account where it belongs.

Which isn't to say he's a usual person to sell real estate alongside of, even though he's not so different from the real estate seller I've become over the years and for some of the same reasons-neither of us minds being around strangers dawn to dusk, and nothing else seems very suitable. Yet I'm aware some of my competitors smirk behind both our backs when they see Mike out planting Realty-Wise signs in front yards. And though occaisonally potential buyers experience a perplexed moment when a voice inside them shouts, "Wait. I'm being shown a beach bungalow by a fucking Tibetan!"-most clients come around soon enough to think of Mike as someone special who's theirs, and get over his unexpected Asian-ness as I have, to the point they can treat him like any other biped.

Looked at from a satellite circling the earth, Mike is not very different from most real estate agents, who often turn out to be exotics in their own right: ex-Concorde pilots, ex-NFL linebackers, ex-Jack Kerouac scholars, ex-wives whose husbands run off with Vietnamese au pairs, then wish to God they could come back, but aren't allowed to. The real estate seller's role is, after all, never one you fully occupy, no matter how long you do it. You somehow always think of yourself as "really" something else. Mike started his strange life's odyssey in the mid-eighties as a telemarketer for a U.S. company in Calcutta, where he learned to talk American by taking orders for digital thermocators and moleskin pants from housewives in Pompton Plaines and Bridgeton. And yet with his short gesturing arms, smiley demeanor and aggressively cheerful outlook he can seem and act just like a bespectacled little Adam's-appled math professor at Iowa State. And indeed, in his duties as a residential specialist, he's comprehended his role as being a "metaphor" for the assimilating, stateless immigrant who'll always be what he is (particularly if he's from Tibet) yet who develops into a useful, purposeful citizen who helps strangers like himself find safe haven under a roof (he told me he's read around in Camus).

Over the last year and a half, Mike has embraced his new calling with gusto by turning himself into a strangely sharp dresser, by fine- tuning a flat, accentless news-anchor delivery (his voice sometimes seems to come from offstage and not out of him), by sending his two kids to a pricey private school in Rumson, by mortgaging himself to the gizzard, by separating from his nice Tibetan wife, driving a fancy silver Infiniti, never speaking Tibetan (easy enough) and by frequenting-and probably supporting-a girlfriend he hasn't told me about. All of which is fine. My only real complaint with him is that he's a Republican. (Officially, he's a registered Libertarian-fiscal conservative, social moderate, which makes you nothing at all.) But he voted for numbskull Bush and, like many prosperous newcomers, stakes his pennant on the plutocrat's principle that what's good for him is probably good for all others-which as a world-view and in spite of his infectious enthusiasm, seems to rob him of a measure of inner animation, a human deficit I usually associate with citizens of the Bay Area, but that he would say is because he's a Buddhist.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford Copyright © 2006 by Richard Ford. Excerpted by permission.
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