Customer Reviews

The Lay of the Land: Bascombe Trilogy (3) (Vintage Contemporaries)

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

"This novel showcases many of Mr. Ford's gifts: his ability to capture the nubby, variegated texture of ordinary life; his unerring ear for how ordinary people talk; his talent for conjuring up subsidiary characters with a handful of brilliant brushstrokes.
MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times

Frank Bascombe, real estate manager, aka sportswriter and novelist, is in the prime of his life. He is on what he describes as ""the permanent phase" of his life, the period when life "starts to look like a destination rather than a journey". He is 55, his second wife has left him for her first husband, he has prostate cancer, his daughter is moving from her lesbian phase, to what exactly? His son has a girlfriend and wants a relationship with his father. But Paul, the son is overbearing and, what was it that Frank did not give him? His first wife, Anne, calls and wants to start another relationship, But, do they really love each other? These and other life problems all emerge within three days of this 500 page novel.

These three days take place in 2000. I began to see the irony in Frank's thinking when he said his life was going down a permanent road, just when the election of Bush has just taken place. There is no peace in America or in Frank's life at this time. We find that events and tragedy's spring up around us at all times. Frank realizes he has fear for 'The Lay of the Land' in 2000, and, as we all know 9/11/2001 is just around the corner. We have the luxury of looking back as Frank tells his story.

Some parts of this novel are too limiting, the explosion in the local hospital, and one of the police officers must question him as a suspect but that never occurs. His first wife has but a small part in the novel, and it is confusing. I wonder if her part is to explain that we are all looking for love and may be confused about where we will find it. The next door neighbors are strange and the final chapter leaves no gratification. People come and people go in these three days, and we learn alot about some and more about others. Frank is a man that we feel some sympathy for, but do we really like him? Yes, he has his faults, and I see some of mine in him. This is a book to ponder and re-read. Frank is wondering what his last days will be like. He wonders as he is ordering a complete Thanksgiving dinner that is organic and elite and is it edible?

I consider this book to be one of the best of the year. Like Cormac McCarthy's book, 'The Road' the other great book of this year. 'Lay of the Land' looks back to look at what has happened while "The Road" looks to the future so we can contemplate where we are.

"Yet while the melancholy settles in deeper this time, Bascombe remains what he always has been: a funny, kind and gentle man, a possessor, as one critic observed, of the "mysteriousness of the agreeable, nice person, harder to describe than the rake, miser or snob". Which is to say, he is not merely pleasant. Ford has kept Emerson in mind throughout: "Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none." Bascombe is willing to speak difficult truths and does so; but he doesn't enjoy it and says so. "
BRIAN McCLUSKEY, The Scotsman

Highly, Highly Recommended. prisrob 11-13-06

Having written his first two tomes in 1986 and 1996, author Richard Ford seems poised to end Frank Bascombe's story as he approaches the age of 60; with a decade's gap. Ford is a marvelous writer of prose, and while much of the book takes place in Bascombe's thoughts, we are treated to dialogue in his encounters with friends and foes from the earlier books, as well as a new character or two - notably his employee, realtor Mike Mahoney, who is a Tibetan Buddhist and a consummate capitalist.

In addition to the ups and downs of normal life, as the book opens Bascombe muses on his own mortality. He has suffered from prostrate cancer for which he is treated at the Mayo clinic with a procedure that sounds like a clinical trial, so incomprehensible is it to me to be walking around with radioactive pellets in your body.


It is this sense of ongoing danger and risk that sets the tone for the musings of Bascombe, as he looks back on his successes and failures during the "permanent period" of his life....where he's reached his destination on the Jersey shore, instead of continuing his journey. But where his thoughts on life and death seemed to spur his actions in the first two novels, in "The Lay of the Land", they seem somewhat incidental to a series of unrelated, ordinary happenings. There are whole sections of the book, that, while descriptive, seem to go nowhere. Eventually, as you bog down and wonder where Ford is taking you, you start to be bothered by his lengthy descriptive passages for ordinary incidentals. In short, where the first two books gave depth and sincerity to writer/realtor Bascombe, this third novel becomes tedious.

I must say I'm disappointed, because after the first chapter, "Are You Ready to Meet Your Maker?", I anticipated loving the book and carved out a weekend to read the whole thing. I loved Ford's dalliance with Frank as a member of the New Jersey "Sponsors" network, an organization that could have spawned the whole novel, of ordinary people giving ordinary advice to complete strangers for ordinary problems. And there are passages where Ford captures his voice and the lyrical quality of his prose is second to none.

I'm not sorry I purchased "The Lay of the Land", but I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, and I certainly shake my head at the thought that it is making a lot of "Top 10" lists for 2006. Methinks it is Ford's reputation, and not the novel itself, that has critics crowing.

Nonetheless, if he keeps writing, I'll keep reading!

As the guardian of Frank Bascombe's life and times, Richard Ford faces in this third book a two-pronged dilemma: First, how to continue the trend of surpassed expectations for the product, and, second, how to keep it fresh. In the end, an alienated protaganist who squats inside our heads for twenty-five years is either going to start having wacky things happen to him, or start to sound tediously self-absorbed, or both. In The Lay of the Land, sadly, it's both. Several of the things that happen to Frank in this book (as things can only happen to Frank) are so implausible as to make them, paradoxically, predictable--as if the only person they could have happened to is the person to whom they must. Moreover, a guy who, after twenty-five years of behaving in these very ways, can still leave his house to squirrel-up a routine real estate deal when he knows he is about to receive the most important telephone call of his recent life, seems at this point less deserving of our sympathy as a modern anti-hero, and more as someone in immediate and lasting need of some heavy-duty counseling. All in all, a disappointing effort from a true virtuoso of the modern form. Sorry, Richard. Sorry, Frank. Sorry, everyone.

I love this series and have waited patiently for further Frank Adventures. The wait has paid off. Yes, it's a long book; and yes there is some repetition, but the amazing wit and insightfullness of the writer's ability to plunge the depths of Frank's soul is astounding. Each sentence is wonderfully crafted with twists and turns that tug at your soul and at other times make you laugh outloud; he paints images that stay with you; notes situations and and experiences that plague all of us 50 somethings. I thought it was a fabulous read. Not a quick read, but one to be savoured by the fire this winter. He makes me laugh that warm human bittersweet laugh of recognition. *** I subsequently went ahead and got the AUDIO version .. wow ...Go ahead a treat yourself .. get this audio and listen to the wonderful narrator (Joe Barret) tell Frank Bascombe's story. This is a book that is meant to be heard out loud. I am not an audiobook fan, but this reading has won me over. The writing is heart-wrenchingly touching and the reading supports the writing 100 per cent. I laughed, I cried. Gee whiz, it's good stuff.

It's a real delight to once again share a few days with Frank Bascombe of "Independence Day" and "The Sportswriter" during the Thanksgiving period of 2000 as he goes about his affairs as the owner of a real estate company in a small NJ sea-shore borough and as he touches base with acquaintances and family. However, for someone at age fifty-five in a supposedly "permanent phase" of life, where destinations are essentially known and room for change or even mistakes is limited, he continues to do an awfully lot of soul searching and contemplation concerning life's subtleties and vagaries.

Whether Frank is conducting real estate transactions with his Tibetan associate Mike, stopping in a bar or hospital cafeteria, attending a building implosion with an ex-girlfriend's father, encountering his ex-wife Ann, reconnecting with his children, or meeting his current wife's thought-to-be-dead ex-husband Wally, he invariably tries to put it all into a larger context. Adding dimension to his normal reflections is his recent diagnosis and treatment for prostate cancer. It's not unlikely that many would find page after page of ruminations a bit tedious, yet, despite their length, others will find his thoughts to be insightful and down to earth. Most of us are concerned with the same things as is Frank.

Not all segments of the book are equally compelling. His interaction with a rich widow, in his role as a participant in an organization that gives anonymous help, seems strained. And his dealings with his neighbor go from estranged to bizarre. Though the author attempts to tie Frank's various stops together, there is a certain amount of disconnectedness. But then this book is not about plot. Frank offers a great deal of interesting commentary on the details of modern life including real estate on the NJ shore and concerns about the 2000 presidential election. As others have commented, Frank is not a particularly happy man, though he is very likeable. But that may be the point: it's not attainable. Perhaps his thoughts on the ideal woman say it all. He doesn't think it is possible to live for any amount of time with a woman who perpetually finds him fascinating. In fact, having identified such a woman, Frank's attempt to hook up on Thanksgiving Day does not work out. And so it goes.

If you like to get in a book that is plot-driven, you probably want to steer clear of this book. Not a lot happens, in other words. If, on the other hand, you enjoy a character-driven book, then you might enjoy riding shotgun with Frank Bascombe through that State of Confusion known as the "Garden State."

Ford is at the top of his game as a writer. The tone is conversational, the asides often funny, and the observations about our times insightful. Still, unless you've read Frankly before, you might be asking, along about p. 100, "What's it all about, Alfie?" (OK, Franky.) No matter how wonderful the writing or how deep the character, at some point all except for the most patient of readers will cry, "My kingdom for a plot!"

This is by far the best of Ford's novels. At least I found it so, and I've read them all. Don't believe any negative criticism you might hear. If one other person besides myself feels - believes - that this is an incredibly brilliant painstakingly careful work of art, then it is. It is no less than a book about why people have individual lives. Exhaustive, detailed, insightful descriptions of behaviors, people, small events, thought processes abound. Full of effortless aphorisms and wisdom, sad but not regretful, compassionate, forgiving, cynical, despairing, loving, life-affirming, death-affirming, seamless, intelligent, this is a book that no thinking person who has suffered a full life could ever deny or find fault with. Ford seems to have remembered and accepted every quirk in human nature that anyone has ever recorded, and to have done the impossible: written in clear, solid, grown-up prose all of those fleeting, formless, ugly, teasing, dreamlike, nameless experiences we all have 25 times a day (not to mention night!) and thought no one human being could ever possibly describe. He has revealed the lifetimes that compose, and decompose, 3 days of deceptively common, uneventful family life, and will make you ashamed of ever having considered any life boring, or any awareness less than a revelation.

I feel like I've been driving all around New Jersey with an introspective, somewhat self-absorbed, chatterbox. Frank Bascombe - I love you, but let me out of this Suburban.

Here is a book to love and to hate. There are moments when I wanted to throw it across the room, endless passages of soporific detail about driving directions, for example, or far worse, a set piece in the middle of the book that is an exact retread of the central incident of the second volume of this trilogy and which should have come with a warning: if you read "Independence Day," skip the next 75 pages or you'll be swamped with deja vue. On the other hand, the ruminations on the Permanent Period and the finely drawn, lovingly ironic characterizations of many of the characters are illuminating, tender and memorable. In no way, however, is it at all fair to call this book one of the 10 best of the year, unless of course the editors at the New York Times, failing to read their own reviewer, based their votes on the first two novels of this series, not this one.

Having spent most of my time reading business related books, I thought it was time for a change of pace with a fictional book. So, off I went to my favorite bookstore, hoping to find something interesting, informative and creative.

However, buying a book in the bookstore is like buying a bottle of wine in the wine store - challenging. You see the covers/labels etc. and instinctively, though often superficially, make your choice, hopefully for the best. It's obviously an inexact process, as frustrating as it is confusing, unless you have a favorite author or a strong recommendation to guide your selection.

All of which is a grim way of saying that I bought this book cold - without prior knowledge of the author or his previous books, apart what appeared on the book liner. In fact, I actually checked a few Amazon reviews in the book store (most said that it was OK) before putting my money down and carrying it away. Honestly, the biggest attractions were the age of the protagonist, Frank Bascombe, and how he dealt with his newly diagnosed prostate cancer (a disease that is becoming increasingly endemic among my friends and peers), and his adult children.

Subsequently, I have read many more reviews posted on this book, which I think fairly described my feelings as I slogged my way through this gruesome tome. I believe that these reviews are objectively reasonable, if not overstated. My favorite was that this book is similar to Seinfeld - a book about nothing, certainly nothing that you especially care about. Another reviewer thought that the 500 pages could have been reduced to 150. I agree.

For as many books that I have read, I was surprised by all the new words (to me) that I was seeing in just the first few pages. At first it seemed like fun - sitting with my dictionary next to me researching these new words. Soon it just became excessive and annoying, as though the author was trying to smugly disguise mindless vocabulary for a plot line that was worth caring about. It was like reading Melville back in the day - only there was no whale at the end to keep your interest.

Paragraphs of descriptive digressions morphed into pages and chapters, until I began skimming the paragraphs. Ultimately, I found myself not caring about Frank Bascombe, or his various plights - even though we are chronologically linked. I just wanted the book to be over.

This is not a good thing, which is why I can hardly endorse this book.

Perhaps had I read Ford's prior books I would have enjoyed this segment of Bascombe's "life" more. Suffice it to say that I will neither read those prior books, nor look forward to the next.