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