The Lay Of The Land


THE LAY OF THE LAND
by Richard Ford

Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2008, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2006, NY Times Finalist 2006

Date Read: August 6, 2020

The Lay of the Land finds Frank Bascombe maturing into his Permanent Period. For a man of only 55, he seems incredibly old to me, rapidly losing his vitality. While The Sportswriter and Independence Day enthralled me, this novel, the third in the series, was tedious, overly verbose and, frankly, boring. I'm impressed with myself for making it through. How quickly things change!

Bascombe remains one of the most self-involved characters I have encountered. Then again, I suppose we all are to some extent. But Frank has a unique ability to only contemplate his sphere of influence and the happenings in the world that affect him. He doesn't really consider other's circumstances, suffering or experiences. He walks through the world with blinders on. Again, we all do this to some extent but Bascombe seems to be an extreme version of this.

I am also struck by the racism, some subtle, some overt, that ribbons through all three of these novels. In Lay of the Land, for example, encountering the following sentence had me walk away from this novel for a few days: "A lone Sea-Clift town cop in his black-and-white Plymouth waits in the shadows beside the fire department in case some wild-as boogies from East Orange show up to give us timid white people something to think about." WTF? 

While I cannot deny that Ford is incredibly talented, I found this experience to be 400 pages too long. I do not consider Bascombe a hero figure, but sort of an anti-hero. He remains the deepest shallow character I have encountered.

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