So this is Frank Bascombe. You guys have met before, actually - you might remember, a few years back. Frank is working as a realtor, or an estate agent as you Brits would have it, and has made a pretty nice living out of it. So much so, in fact, that he now runs his own company, Realty-Wise. He's moved out of the town of Haddam where he lived in the previous two books in which he features, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and now lives not far away in the quiet New Jersey coastal resort of Sea-Clift.
Frank is in his mid-fifties now (it's late 2000 when the book opens, in the controversial aftermath of the Bush-Gore presidential election) and, while he keeps himself in pretty trim shape, has had to make certain accommodations to middle age, not least in coming to terms with a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer, a (depressingly) quintessentially middle- and even old-aged man's disease. Any worries about how this, and its accompanying radiotherapy treatment regime, might affect regular combat operations in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, are rendered sadly academic, at least for the moment, by Frank's second wife Sally recently upping and leaving him in a somewhat bizarre sequence of events.
Basically while Frank and his first wife Ann just got divorced in a fairly mundane way, Sally's first husband Wally disappeared, apparently in a fairly permanent way, shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam in about 1970. Well, OK, a bit weird, but these things happen, and Sally has put it behind her. Except it turns out it isn't behind her after all, as one day Wally just turns up out of the blue at his parents' place and announces he's been scraping a living in some sort of commune on the Isle of Mull for the last couple of decades. Frank isn't sure how to react to this news, nor how he expects Sally to react (still less what the legal ramifications are for his marriage to her). What he probably isn't expecting is for her to head off back to Mull with Wally - not necessarily permanently, so she says, but to try and resolve some unfinished business.
So Frank finds himself on his own in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Well, not quite on his own, as plans gradually come together to reunite what remains of his family for the day. His daughter Clarissa has been spending some time with him anyway as she's decided to take charge of the situation regarding his cancer treatment. Clarissa is herself navigating some life changes though - previously in a fairly stable relationship with her girlfriend Cookie, she has recently split up with her and is now back on solids with new boyfriend Thom. Frank's son Paul, meanwhile, of a slightly more challenging personality type but seemingly making a decent living as a slogan writer for Hallmark cards, is also due to arrive with his new girlfriend Jill. Finally, in a rash moment, Frank invites his ex-wife Ann (who, to be fair, is also Clarissa and Paul's mother)
Frank has a few things to sort out before he and the family can settle in to some serious troughing down into the old brined and deep-fried turkey and a couple of hundredweight of candied yams, creamed corn and similar incomprehensible American Thanksgiving cuisine. Firstly he has to go and facilitate the sale of a chalet with his Realty-Wise protégé, Mike, something he manages to fuck up after insisting the prospective client view the inside of the property, thereby inadvertently facilitating a mildly terrifying encounter with a feral fox. Then he has an encounter with Detective Marinara, who has transcended being named after a pasta sauce to rise through the police ranks and has been put in charge of investigating an explosion at Haddam hospital resulting in the death of a member of staff, as it happens someone known personally to Frank. No suggestion that Frank is a suspect, but Marinara wants to tie up a few loose ends. Finally, and most bizarrely of all, and putting a pretty comprehensive spanner in the Thanksgiving works, the Feensters, Frank's generally irritating and awful neighbours, are held up by a couple of heavily-armed feral youths who want to steal their cars (a couple of flashy and ostentatious Corvettes), and in the front-yard confrontation which follows both Feensters are comprehensively ventilated and Frank is shot in the chest - non-fatally as it turns out.
A wibbly-wobbly dissolve now to a few months later - Frank is out of hospital having recovered from his gunshot woulds, and is on his way to another hospital to have his prostate investigated to see how the radiotherapy has gone. Accompanying him on the plane trip is Sally, returned from Mull and tentatively reunited with Frank.
As I said above, this is the third novel in what a lot of people at the time referred to as the "Bascombe trilogy", presumably in the expectation that Richard Ford was getting on a bit, there was quite a gap between books and that that might be all of them. I think Ford himself may also have dropped some hints that that was likely to be it. Not a bit of it, in fact, as there have subsequently been two further books: the punderfully-titled Let Me Be Frank With You, a collection of loosely-linked short stories, in 2014, and then the novel Be Mine in 2023, which, as if to prove that people never learn, Ford's Wikipedia page confidently refers to as the "presumably final" novel in the series. I mean, maybe it is - if nothing else Ford is now 81, and this list exists, so, well, you do the math.
Never mind all that, though: is it any good? Well, yes, I would say it is, although it must also be said that standard sequelitis applies as much here as it does to lower forms of art such as, say, the Police Academy movies. The alert reader who's read the first two books will certainly observe fairly early on that the general structure here is very similar to that of Independence Day, just substituting in Thanksgiving as the significant event that the novel's events meander their way towards. And meander they certainly do, as the entire timeline of the novel's 700+ pages (more on this in a bit) occupies only about three days, and moreover the assumed climax of the book, the Thanksgiving dinner at which certain uncomfortable family discussions may occur, grievances will be aired, revelations, erm, revelated, etc. etc., never actually occurs, Frank's near-murder putting a stop to it (again, something quite similar occurs in Independence Day). So while the writing style is very smooth and digestible and Frank is an appealing middle-class everyman - bright, basically decent, occasionally mercurial and still haunted by the premature death of his son Ralph back in the early 1980s and the subsequent collapse of his first marriage - there are moments where the reader wishes the characters and their author would just GET ON WITH IT a bit.
That general low-key meandery-ness and the general polo-and-chino-clad white middle-class-ness of it all makes the lurid purple-lycra-clad vulgarity of the Feensters even more jarring, and their subsequent messy demise doubly so, although I guess messy multiple murder in a quiet suburban setting - clearly a thing that does happen, especially in the USA - is inherently jarring and weird.
The thing that resonated specifically with me was that The Lay Of The Land just happens to capture a snapshot of Frank Bascombe when he is exactly the same age that I am now. It's sobering, since if I were to be somehow rendered not constantly, painfully, conscious of how unbelievably old I am and obliged to work just from the description of Frank offered here and my own physical sensations I'd say: well, this old geezer is clearly quite a bit older than me: prostate cancer, occasional dizzy spells, bladder trouble (admittedly mostly a side-effect of the cancer treatment), while I, tragic male pattern baldness aside, am a fit and active guy, weigh no more than I did twenty years ago, still irrepressibly and priapically horny, etc. That sounds like a brag, and I suppose it partly is, but the main point is that this stuff happens to everyone sooner or later, and, also, I suppose, that one's own residual self-image isn't the best guide to objective external reality as observed by others.
The timelines, incidentally, assuming that my assertions about Frank's son Paul's age in the Independence Day post are accurate, go something like this:
- The Sportswriter
- Published: 1986
- Set: 1983
- My reading: ??late 1990s/early 2000s??
- Independence Day
- Published: 1995
- Set: 1988
- My reading: 2009
- The Lay Of The Land
- Published: 2006
- Set: 2000
- My reading: 2025
Finally, my paperback copy of The Lay Of The Land is not only an intimidating 726 pages, but is also printed on incredibly thin paper, so that it's a lot thinner than you'd expect. To illustrate this, here it is with my copy of Independence Day, which is 451 pages but about the same thickness, and my ancient copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which at 734 pages is almost exactly the same length but nearly twice as thick.
I assume the legend printed on the publisher information page and reproduced below is relevant here, though what it actually means is unclear to me. Conversely and contrariwise the print is quite large and widely-spaced at only 28 lines per page (Independence Day has 39), so if it were printed differently it'd be a lot shorter. This Guardian review, presumably of a differently-formatted hardback edition, lists it as 487 pages.
Lastly, and more importantly, my copy is missing some pages around the middle of the book, in particular pages 361-362, 375-378 and 391-392 (i.e. four physical sheets of paper in total). The nature of the book being what it is we can be reasonably confident that no alien invasions, bukkake dungeon sex orgies or hideously-botched scientific experiments involving cloning Hitler happen on those pages, but it's a bit annoying nonetheless. The only other time I recall this happening was when I read Bluesman, though that was only one sheet (i.e. two pages). I see from searching for that link that something similar (a printing error rather than a binding error in this case) happened with my copy of Lolita as well.
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