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.
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