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Near the end of Richard Ford's third novel on Frank Bascombe, a sportswriter turned real estate agent, I felt as I often do on Thanksgiving: regretting that third serving of stuffing and gravy.
Like a good feast, there are some wonderful side dishes in The Lay of the Land. Ford can be a brilliant and lyrical writer. No one is better at describing landscapes -- the physical, moral and emotional kinds.
But his new novel is not as powerful as its predecessors, 1986's The Sportswriter and 1995's Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In the new, less focused novel, Bascombe is more distant and harder to care about.
Ford covers three days in the life of his narrator. It's 2000, just before Thanksgiving, "the beginning of the gloomy Christmas season, vale of aching hearts and unreal hopes."
The presidential race remains unsettled. Bascombe, who voted for Al Gore, observes Democratic placards insisting, "We the voters who voted really mean it this time and still mean it and won't stand for foolishness," to which he adds, "Though of course we will."
At 55, Bascombe is feeling "off-shore, a low-level, slightly removed-from-events, wooing-wind agitation." His second wife has left him, and he's being treated for a slow-growing tumor in his prostate: "As things stand now, I won't outlive my mortgage, my twenty-five-year roof, possibly not even my car."
He's still doing well in real estate and has moved to the Jersey shore. But he remains haunted by the memory of a son, forever 9, who died of Reye's syndrome. His two grown children are "worrisome." His son writes "laughable captions for the great megalithic Hallmark." His daughter is a bisexual Harvard grad, out to "try men again before it was too late -- whatever that might mean."
Land is best in its wry observations on realty and "the sprawl business." Bascombe confesses: "I'm implicated. You have a wish? Wait. I'll make it come true (or at least show you my inventory.)"
But at times it seems as if Ford spent a lot of time driving around, taking notes that end up as needless details in the novel: "The drive-thru ATM at South Shore Savings is doing a smart business, as is the adult books, Guppies to Puppies and the bottle redemption center -- the former Ford dealership."
Some of Ford's sentences seem in search of an end: "Another way of saying this (and there're too many ways to say everything) is that some force in my life was bringing me hard up against what felt like my self (after a lengthy absence), presenting me, if I chose to accept it, with an imperative that all my choices in recent memory -- volitions, discretions, extra beats, time spent offshore -- hadn't presented me, though I might've said that they had and argued you to the dirt about it."
That said, I think I'll skip dessert.
The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford
Knopf, 485 pp., $26.95
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