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Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN13: 9780679776673
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Best Book of the Year
A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father –Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.
After more than a decade, Richard Ford revives Frank Bascombe, the beloved protagonist from The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Fans will be scrambling for The Lay of the Land, a novel that finds Bascombe contending with health, marital, and familial issues wake of the 2000 presidential election. We asked Richard Ford to tell us a little more about what it's like to create (and share so much time with) a character like Frank. Read his short essay below. --Daphne Durham
Richard Ford on Frank Bascombe
 I never think of the characters I write as exactly people, the way some writers say they do, letting their characters "just take over and write the book;" or for that matter, in the way I want readers to think of them as people, or even as I think of characters in novels I myself read (and didn't write). In my own books I do all the writing--the characters don't. And for me to think of them as people, instead of as figures made of language, would make my characters less subject to the useful and necessary changes that occur as I grow in my own awareness about them as I make them up. Writing a character for twenty-five years and for three novels, as I have written about Frank Bascombe, has meant that Frank has, of course, become a presence in my life (and a welcome one). When I wrote Independence Day I began with the belief that Frank was pretty much the same character and presence he was in The Sportswriter. But when I went back later and read parts of The Sportswriter, I found that the sentences Frank "spoke" and that filled that second book were longer, more complex, and actually contained more nitty experience than the first book. This has also been true of The Lay of the Land: longer sentences, more experience to reconcile and transact, more words required to make lived life seem accessible. You could say that Frank had simply changed as we all do. But practically speaking--as his author--what this makes me think is that I've had to make up Frank up newly each time, and have not exactly "gone back" and "found" him--although Frank's history from the previous books has certainly needed to be kept in sight and made consistent. What is finally consistent to me about Frank is that I "hear" language I associate with him, and it is language that pleases me, with which I and he can (if I'm a good enough writer) represent life in an intelligent and hopeful and buoyant spirit a reader can make use of. --Richard Ford
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| Crowning finish to a fine trilogy |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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When you foolishly make a New Year's resolution to read fifty-two books in fifty-two weeks, a pledge I foolishly made, Lay of the Land is so not the way to begin the marathon. This is not a book to race through, nor is it a book that will grab you by the lapels and pull you headlong from start to finish. No. It's a book to be savored and enjoyed for what it is -- a character study and compelling portrait of America through one man's eyes.
Lay of the Land is the third book in a trilogy about novelist turned sportswriter turned realtor Frank Bascomb. The first novel, The Sportswriter was an excellent read, and the second, Independence Day, won a Pulitzer Prize. This third novel, published in 2006 (which goes to show I've fallen behind in my reading -- hence the New Year's resolution), is as good as the previous two. You can read it alone and learn the back story as you go along. Still, Richard Ford writes so well, you really should start with The Sportswriter and move on from there.
This novel covers a couple or three days in Frank Bascomb's life, right around Thanksgiving Day, 2000. Don't look for plot. Don't stop and ask where the story is going. It will take you where it wants to go -- sometimes to the ordinary but more often to one surprise after another. You'll learn all about Frank, his past and his relationships, almost all of which are at least borderline dysfunctional and sadly in need of repair. You'll feel for Frank as a man whose life isn't what he wanted it to be, even though he is now a wealthy and successful businessman. You'll root for him throughout a tale full of humor, brilliant characterization and plenty of emotion.
I hope you enjoy this novel as much as I did.
Joe
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| Best of the Three |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I have now read all of Ford's Frank Bascombe books: The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land. I enjoyed the first two books but The Lay of the Land is my favorite. As do the other two books, it displays Ford's gift for language and description. The narrative, however, sets it apart. Its rhythm and pace reveal a warmer, more genuine and often funny (really) Frank. Even the dialogue, Ford's weak suit, is improved.
If you enjoyed The Sportswriter and Independence Day, you should read The Lay of the Land. Even if you didn't like the first two books, though, you may want to give the third one a chance. Like me, you may end up hoping that Ford doesn't tire of Frank Bascombe and continues his story further.
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| Elegant, funny, poignant, and highly recommended |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Frank Bascombe, the narrator of THE LAY OF THE LAND is a successful residential real estate agent who finds the experience of selling real estate both empowering and beneficent. At the same time, Frank has a complex but not atypical personal life. He's twice married, loves his current wife, and has two children in their late twenties. His son is childish but is finding happiness in a mainstream American life. His brilliant daughter is slow getting started. Finally, Frank has prostate cancer, which he has addressed with radioactive seed implants. In TLotL, Ford explores these circumstances in Frank's life, primarily in three successive days ending on Thanksgiving 2000. The Florida recount is underway and in the background.
As the highly articulate Frank moves from appointment to appointment during these three days, he constantly discusses his philosophy for what he deems his Permanent Period in life. In this stage, a person has stopped trying "to become" and instead is content "to be." With this Buddhist-like mind set, Frank says regret and guilt fade to a dull and not-painful haze while the present offers the sustenance of predictable yet earned pleasures and rewards. This is a realistic philosophy, Frank believes, for a man of 55.
Of course, Frank's desire to live in the Permanent Period is challenged by life itself, with powerful emotions and irrevocable acts continually exploding in this narrative. There is a bombing at a hospital, a fight in a bar, and an act of vandalism, all representing assertions of anger that a benign philosophy fails to address or contain. Further, there is great cruelty inflicted on Frank, usually borne of confusion, but cruelty and, its subsequent pain, nonetheless. Even so, Frank, through most of this novel, is able to pull all events and experiences inside the big soothing tent of the Permanent Period. What the novel leads up to is a moment of truth when Frank, drinking alone in a bar, tearfully experiences the shortcomings of his philosophy. The insightful and wry Frank then resolves to move to the Next Level, where life "can't be escaped" and must be "faced entire."
In following Frank through his three-days of activities and his philosophic mulling (as well as unscheduled stops to pee), Ford shows a genius-like ability to revisit the same issues--the bittersweet experience of marriage and fatherhood, the pleasures of business interplay, the mighty power of the past, the flora and fauna of the suburbs, and the prospect of death--and keep them fresh and funny. In mocking Frank, Wade Arcenault, his octogenarian buddy, sneers: "Think, think, thinky, think." Yet this is precisely the engine--Frank's interesting mind and fascinating musings--that powers this novel's wonderful narrative. With Frank Bascombe, Ford has created a GREAT character with lots to say about ordinary life and I urge you to meet him. I only wish Frank didn't feel so guilty.
Two quick final observations: The wordplay in THE LAY OF THE LAND is sensational and sometimes hilarious. And Joyce scholars must get special pleasure from this book, since Frank Bascombe is certainly the Leopold Bloom of New Jersey's Ocean County.
Highly recommended.
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| Lays Out the Later Life |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I'm hugely enjoying this sprawling, cleverly-written book. In some ways it reminds me of "Ulysses," in its restricted but minutely examined time period. There are even a couple of bar scenes. The author is not a New Jerseyite but seems to me to have gotten the flavor of the millenial year and the scene quite well. As one who is in his "fourth quartile," I can relate to Frank Bascombe's angst and his feeling of purposelessness. Ford has a marvelous vocabulary and obviously enjoys wordplay.
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| "Lay" Lands Hard |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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I loved the first two installments of this magnificent trilogy on the life of this "ordinary" man trying to make sense of life in New Jersey at this particular juncture in American history. This third volume, however, I have found a bit hard-going, with far less narrative drive than the previous. He is terribly bogged down in Jersey shore real estate jargon. It's a dense piece, really, altogether less interesting, perhaps because it is largely familiar territory. It is also less interesting because the cast of characters is so limited, and the exchanges with house shoppers is not very compelling. Frank Bascombe/Ford's observations of women are better than on men, but here he is concentrated somehow on disengaging and doesn't seem to care about women. This may be part of the crisis Frank is experiencing with prostate cancer; obviously that would take one's mind off the opposite sex, but as a narrative choice, it does make more a more static read. The jersey shore is interesting in its own right, of course, and deserves this close attention, but if you compare Ford's real estate world to Roth's New Jersey glove factory in "American Pastoral," for example, one can see that Ford has a long way to go to master a world and make it his own. One also can't help but compare this to Updike's last Rabbit novel, "Rabbit at Rest," which falls off considerably from the superior "Rabbit Is Rich," which may say something about making death and dying central to a lengthy novel. Rabbit and Bascombe are far more interesting as vital men of middle age, still filled with possibility and hope. Be that as it may, Ford is New Jersey's great explorer; he makes living here almost bearable.
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