With The Sportswriter, in 1986, Richard Ford commenced a cycle of novels that ten years laterโafter Independence Day won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Awardโwas hailed by The Times of London as โan extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the twentieth century itself.โ Now, a decade later, Frank Bascombe returns, with a new lease on life (and real estate), more acutely in thrall to lifeโs 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 โthat long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary personโs; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the worldโif it makes note at allโknows of me, how Iโm seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is thatโs wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion.โ 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: โAll the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies.โ
A holiday, and a novel, no reader will ever forgetโat 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.
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