By BOB HOOVER
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
_ "THE LAY OF THE LAND." By Richard Ford. Knopf. $26.95.
Life is a hard proposition. It takes focus, effort, fancy footwork, false encouragement and a clean shirt. Even then, something pops up to knock you down.
At 55, Frank Bascombe has taken the gut punches of wife-desertion and prostate cancer in less than six months. Then his first wife hints she'd like to try again. It's more than enough to make a guy turn philosophical:
We're not fooled with the label. Bascombe is stuck in his comfortable middle-aged life, smug inside his chinos and Oxford-cloth shirt, content to drift like the sand near his New Jersey home on the coast.
When Sally leaves him for her first husband or his doctor calls from the golf course to suggest he take another "looky-look" at those PSA readings, Bascombe shudders, and then goes on, his Permanent Period back in place.
Readers of Richard Ford know that something's in the wings, ready to kick the supports out from underneath his hero and send him sliding toward disaster, like a big wave knocking down the stilts that hold up the beach houses Bascombe sells.
This is Ford's third, and he says, last Bascombe novel, a series that begin in 1986 with "The Sportswriter," then hit full steam with "Independence Day" 10 years later.
Bascombe, who started out trying to be a novelist, still sees life with the ironic detachment of a writer even while peddling versions of the American dream to eager buyers.
Being alive, or as Bascombe calls it, "the be-ing," is the elusive goal of Ford's most anticipated novel, elusive because its ephemeral qualities escape in the welter of physical details that stretch this book to 485 pages.
Unfolding between Tuesday and Thanksgiving Day, 2000, the novel is a literal accounting of Bascombe's every waking thought, observation and deed.
What's enjoyable about reading "Lay of the Land" is seeing and hearing, through Ford's perception, the look, feel and sound of Americans and their (mostly) tacky communities in the new century as everyone holds their breath waiting to learn the outcome of the Bush-Gore election.
It's Ford's analogy for Bascombe's life on hold _ a middle-class guy at mid-century with unhealed emotional scars he'd rather forget. But with a life that produced three children, one dead at 8, two marriages and a handful of affairs, he can't escape heartache, regret and the occasional tearful breakdown that catches him at odd moments.
Ford is a novelist of the old school who respects the linear plot approach, the supple, limitless nature of the English language and the basic decency of most people.
He understands that behind the relentless and growing superficiality of American culture are complex, striving and flawed beings who want to do their best, despite things. All of these issues Ford handles largely with craft and sensitivity, but his design for "The Lay of the Land," sound in its concept, becomes garrulous in its writing.
Like a film camera with wide-angle and deep-focus lenses, Ford takes it all in when he should be discarding, narrowing, pausing for breath, giving Bascombe's overworked brain a rest and giving somebody else's voice a hearing.
We need a way to see this worthy creation from the outside occasionally so that we can better place him in his world, to take measure of the man and test his multitude of opinions.
With this novel, Ford stakes his claim as the successor to John Updike and Philip Roth as the best chronicler of American life in the years following the 1950s.
He's more at home with people up and down the social ladder than Updike and more compassionate than Roth. But, this time, Ford let the words and ideas take over his novel and he lost control of his great and sharp imagination.
Maybe there's a need for a fourth Bascombe. As life grows more threatening, complicated and manipulated, we could use a wise voice like Richard Ford to sort things out.
(Bob Hoover can be reached at bhoover(at)post-gazette.com)
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