“Independence Day,” the second novel in Richard Ford’s remarkable three-book sequence concerning the life and loves of Frank Bascombe, was the kind of bravura performance that was so satisfying that one hardly felt there would be room for more on this subject. That novel won the Pulitzer and P.E.N. Faulkner awards, the first to win both in a single year, and was followed by “A Multitude of Sins” in 2001, which demonstrated again Ford’s mastery of the short-fiction form.
After he’d been compared to such writers as Richard Yates and Walker Percy for the richness and lyricism of his writing, it was reasonable to assume that Ford would be on to other things than Frank Bascombe, the broken-down sportswriter cum realtor of Haddam, N.J.
We should have known better, particularly because at the end of “Independence Day,” Frank is clearly not through telling his story. “There is, naturally, much that’s left unanswered, much that’s left till later, much that’s best forgotten,” he ruminates at the end of the novel. The good news is that this is later, though when we encounter Frank this time around in “The Lay of the Land,” he’s in a reduced state.
Frank was indeed married for a second time to Sally, the love interest in “Independence Day,” but his wife has left him abruptly after a surprise visit by a husband she had left for dead. The son with whom Frank had imagined a future reconciliation is even more alienated from his father than before. And Frank is a cancer survivor, having only recently emerged from the Mayo Clinic with radioactive beads injected where nature never intended radiation to be.
As a result, the period of his life that Frank had previously imagined would be The Permanent Period, when all that had gone before would bear fruit, now seems much less permanent than even the Existence Period charted in “Independence Day.” It’s a daunting way to begin a novel of almost 500 pages. And yet what follows is a breathtaking recitation of a couple of days in the life of a man, and in another way an elegiac look back at what now seems a fairly innocent time in America, before 9/11 forced us all to look at mortality, ours and the nation’s, in a completely new way.
While Ford is often hysterically funny, at base he is an enormously serious writer, able to project himself equally well into local trivia or family drama, at ease with literary references from Thoreau to Henry James and Fitzgerald, but also down-to-earth in both subject and diction. And while it makes sense that we should find his hero is now a real estate tycoon with his own firm on the Jersey shore, Ford makes clear that like Frank, real estate is not what it used to be. Strip malls proliferate and housing projects spread like disease over what used to be sylvan countryside. While owning your home still may be the American dream, the oceanfront condo Frank has listed is found to have rotting pilings and the Russian mob lurks nearby to pick clean those who have moved to the shore to escape crime in the nearby cities.
None of this seems to concern Frank overly. He has his own problems. His alienated children are coming home for Thanksgiving and his ex-wife declares her continuing love for Frank and threatens to pay him a visit. He says of the kids, “Having children can sometimes feel like a long, not very intense depression, since after a while neither has much left to give the other (except love, which isn’t always simple).”
And of his ex-wife, Ann, Frank comments, ” … conversations with one’s ex-wife always exist in a breed-unto-themselves/zero-gravity atmosphere that’s attractive for its old familiarities, but finally less interesting than communication with an alien.”
Of course, none of this stops anyone from descending on Frank, nor does it affect his essential amiableness. His son Paul appears with a 6-foot girlfriend who has only one hand and his daughter Clarissa, having sworn off lesbianism, shows up with the boyfriend from hell. “Thom’s old,” Frank thinks. “At least forty-six,” with Danger stamped on his forehead in letters that only a father could decipher. ” … Clarissa has carefully mentioned nothing about him …” Ford writes, “only that he teaches equestrian therapy to Down syndrome kids at a pretty famous holistic center over in Manchester …”
Though no one ever seems to fully understand what “equestrian therapy” is, Frank’s predictions turn out to be accurate and by the end of the book disaster surrounds the whole family like fog. One possible bright spot is the re-emergence of Sally, who comes back after the once-thought-dead husband actually commits suicide. Frank welcomes her back with alacrity, saying, “The thing about second marriages unlike first ones, which require only hot impulse and drag-strip hormones – is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you’re smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand.”
All of this is well and good in a novel packed with lubricious humor, dazzling literary catalogs a la Stanley Elkin, and a rendering of the Jersey Shore as meticulous as Joyce’s description of Dublin, but it is not finally what distinguishes Ford as a writer unique to his generation.
What characterizes a great deal of contemporary fiction is its personal nature, the suggestion that what really matters is relationships and our reactions to those relationships. There’s something to this; many of the great novels over time have been family novels. This is also true of “The Lay of the Land,” though for this family, dysfunction is the order of the day.
But Frank Bascombe is more than a survivor of time and relationships, for he is also a citizen of the world, whether through his partnership with a Buddhist from Tibet or his musings on the fate of our country as we experience a tide of immigration unheard of a generation ago. Ford is unusual among writers today in his willingness to write about the big issues, and in the process to write long, difficult sentences and take interesting chances with his characters.
By turns hilarious and sad, “The Lay of the Land” is a fitting end piece to “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” but for those who have been following Frank’s peregrinations since 1986, it’s not without regret that we watch him shuffle off to Mayo with Sally in tow at the end of this long novel. His cancer may have been cured, but Frank will be missed. It will be a while before we see his like in fiction again.
(Ford will read from and sign copies of “The Lay of the Land” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Tattered Cover LoDo, 16th and Wynkoop streets, Denver.)
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
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The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford
Knopf, 496 pages, $26.95
