by Richard Ford
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Product Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Best Book of the Year
A sportswriter and a real estate agent, husband and father –Frank Bascombe has been many things to many people. His uncertain youth behind him, we follow him through three days during the autumn of 2000, when his trade as a realtor on the Jersey Shore is thriving. But as a presidential election hangs in the balance, and a postnuclear-family Thanksgiving looms before him, Frank discovers that what he terms “the Permanent Period” is fraught with unforeseen perils. An astonishing meditation on America today and filled with brilliant insights, The Lay of the Land is a magnificent achievement from one of the most celebrated chroniclers of our time.
Amazon.com Review
After more than a decade, Richard Ford revives Frank Bascombe, the beloved protagonist from The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Fans will be scrambling for The Lay of the Land, a novel that finds Bascombe contending with health, marital, and familial issues wake of the 2000 presidential election. We asked Richard Ford to tell us a little more about what it's like to create (and share so much time with) a character like Frank. Read his short essay below. --Daphne Durham
Richard Ford on Frank Bascombe
 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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Average Customer Review:
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Bascombe Redux, 2008-08-28
"Lay of the Land" is the first book I read on my Kindle, and in some sense it's the ideal book to read electronically. You might not think so because it's a complex, interior character study, but the collaged impressions of a stream of consciousness emerge from reading the pages in short typographical bursts on the Kindle screen. This is a book that explores what Frank Bascombe, the central character, calls "the Permanent Period" of life--that post midlife period when the sheer finality of death comes clear and closer, and whispers shrilly in the ear of a man recovering from prostate cancer virtually every hour of every waking day. Bascombe, a sportswriter turned realtor we have met in Ford's earlier novels is a man with a troubled life (isn't everyone's?)--one son killed in childhood, another son and daughter who behave bizarrely and problematically, a second marriage shattered when his wife abandons him for her former husband, and several startling events that interrupt an ordinary realtor's life with the urgency of an ambulance siren. It is a longer than it needs to be--you feel that Ford feels compelled to explore every corner of an experience--but, as a prostate cancer survivor myself, I found it thoroughly engaging. I hope there's another Bascombe book to come.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Best Frank Bascombe, 2008-06-03
This is, to my way of thinking, the best of the 3 Frank Bascombe novels. Frank is now all "growed up" and facing the inevitabilities of late middle age (he's 55): prostrate cancer, ungrateful or at least emotionally angular children, possible failure of a second marriage and re-connection of a first, perhaps early retirement. Frank remains one of the great creations of modern fiction, precisely for what he is not -- heroic, existentially confused, depressed, or captured by a mid-life hormone surge. He's a real human, better than most, but not without flaws; the kind of person I'd like for a friend. He's nothing to excess: intelligent but casually so, kind but capable of the occasional cruelty, wealthy but not showy, and despite all of the above not the least bit boring. After all, you gotta love a guy who can feel entirely comfortable and happy getting drunk in a lesbian bar and be able to express guiltless anger at a sorry-for-himself, vaguely dysfunctional son who blames his father for his unhappiness. I stress the character because the plot isn't much -- to be sure things happen, ordinary things really (Frank's days are filled with more bits and pieces of pastel drama than mine, but still not earth-shaking). His philosophical musings on his life's conditions are interesting, sophisticated, and often wryly funny, and it is his interior life that is the subject of the novel. Wordy? Yes and perhaps 50 pages too long. I tend to be a fast reader and sometimes (to my regret) skip over material that doesn't move a plot along. This book requires considerable attention for maximum benefit, and I found myself rereading some passages, in part to be sure I hadn't missed anything important and in part because the writing really is quite lovely, even poetic (if a low-key way). For those of us who enjoyed the first two novels, this is a must-read. It is certainly possible to read this without having done the first two, but some of the richness of Frank's life would be lost. One of the best books I have read in the past 5 years or so, and I'm hoping we'll be a 4th Bascombe novel. Highly recommended but not for those who are impatient or favor plot over character.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliantly rendered audiobook, 2008-05-19
The Lay of the Land
No need to rehash the storyline or gist of this excellent novel. Just a strong recommendation for the audiobook version, which is brilliantly rendered by Joe Barrett. Mr Barrett brings to life the entire persona of protagonist Frank Bascomb with a sympathy and sensitivity that is rarely found with such profundity in audiobooks. Indeed, the audiobook version may be in some ways preferable to the written page, particularly in working through Ford's denser prose common to some of Frank's introspective ruminations. Some readers may 'lose the string' while reading these passages--this is a book that takes some work, but is well worth it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
ulysses in new jersey, 2008-05-07
Frank Bascomb, Richard Ford's New Jersey real estate agent, is an old soul, part Greek Ulysses, part Leopold Bloom, part Underground Man, but he is also a totally contemporary guy. For three days before Thanksgiving we're on the road with this very unique mind, interacting with the rest of humanity and in particular, the American cultural scene. Hilarious and depressing, Frank is ultimately one of the most memorable and sympathetic characters in literature. This one's in the top 10; okay, top 20.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Not an Excerpt, 2008-04-29
Lay of the Land
I am amused, enlightened and bored, reading on through times of brief satisfaction and lingering hope. Having read Sportswiter and Independence Day, and listened to Ford during a revealing Q&A, I have come to enjoy both his wit and his commentary, but I have to agree that this book is slow with little infusing an interest in continuing.
Except for the surprising ease into a bar fight while awaiting his friend-employee Mahoney, and the fantasies evoked by every mammary encounter, Frank Bascombe, in this book, acts older than his age--55 going on 114. Most of his clever and insightful observations sound like an epitaph. There is the travelogue. If one is interested in which road intersects with which highway or a view of old and new in Everycity, traditional vs modern, elite vs common; it is well presented here with such color and energy we might believe that only in New Jersey will we find it.
I've also read Updike's Rabbit series, where mixed in with colorful characterization and Updike's reflections on the middleclass life, there is a compelling plot that carries you on quickly. Even in death, Harry Angstrom brought excitement. That isn't the case with Frank Bascombe in Lay of the Land. In spite of a sprinkling of brilliance from Ford (found frequently) and his rich character deployments, this is an old man in a rocker, dozing and dreaming with a well-worn copy of Field and Stream in his lap.
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