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37 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bittersweet Downshift In Life Expectations, November 12, 2006
"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
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30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More ordinary, with flashes of brilliance....., February 5, 2007
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!
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well-written as usual, but much more contrived, January 31, 2007
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.
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I never think of the characters I write as exactly people, the way some writers say they do, letting their characters "just take over and write the book;" or for that matter, in the way I want readers to think of them as people, or even as I think of characters in novels I myself read (and didn't write). In my own books I do all the writing--the characters don't. And for me to think of them as people, instead of as figures made of language, would make my characters less subject to the useful and necessary changes that occur as I grow in my own awareness about them as I make them up. Writing a character for twenty-five years and for three novels, as I have written about Frank Bascombe, has meant that Frank has, of course, become a presence in my life (and a welcome one). When I wrote Independence Day I began with the belief that Frank was pretty much the same character and presence he was in The Sportswriter. But when I went back later and read parts of The Sportswriter, I found that the sentences Frank "spoke" and that filled that second book were longer, more complex, and actually contained more nitty experience than the first book. This has also been true of The Lay of the Land: longer sentences, more experience to reconcile and transact, more words required to make lived life seem accessible. You could say that Frank had simply changed as we all do. But practically speaking--as his author--what this makes me think is that I've had to make up Frank up newly each time, and have not exactly "gone back" and "found" him--although Frank's history from the previous books has certainly needed to be kept in sight and made consistent. What is finally consistent to me about Frank is that I "hear" language I associate with him, and it is language that pleases me, with which I and he can (if I'm a good enough writer) represent life in an intelligent and hopeful and buoyant spirit a reader can make use of. --Richard Ford
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