My favourite scene in the movie ‘Meet The Parents’ is when Greg Fokker (Ben Stiller) has to endure the poem of Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro). Jack’s poem is called ‘My Mother’ and goes: “You gave me life/You gave me milk/You gave me courage/Your name was Angela/An angel from heaven/But you were also an angel of God/And he needed you too/I selfishly tried to hold on to you/ While the cancer ate away at your organs/Like an unstoppable rebel force/And now we’ll meet in Heaven/And I shall see you/ Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore“.
Greg’s reaction to this is the great line “That’s amazing, so much love, and also so much information.”
So much information is also what we get in Richard Ford’s latest epic, most of it relates to the first person narrator Frank Bascombe. Fortunately, the experience is less of an ordeal than that of Jack’s poem!
The Lay of the Land is the conclusion of a trilogy of novels centred on the Bascombe character who first appeared in The Sportswriter (1986) and whose story continued in the Pulitzer Prize winning Independence Day (1995) .Viewed as a whole this undertaking is an achievement of Proustian proportions , the latest novel alone must have required Ford to live and breathe the character to get such a depth of detail. The sheer scale of this is all the more astonishing given the fact that Ford is mildly dyslexic. Ford says that a positive aspect of his condition is that it enhances his appreciation of the rhythm and flow of language, something that is evident in this absorbing novel. The measured tone is pitch perfect apart from the needless dramatic scenes near the end which seem to suggest that at that point the writer was thinking ‘Jeez, how the hell do I finish this?’
The book draws the reader into the world of Frank’s life. He is a 55 year old realty estate agent in New Jersey whose business of selling homes is going well, something which cannot be said for the rest of his life. Essentially I would say this novel is one of how to come to terms with inevitable effects of ageing. Bascombe feels that at his age his life should be on an even course but having to deal with not one, but two challenging ex-wives and having to come to terms with the fact that he has prostate cancer means that what he calls the ‘permanent period’ is anything but stable.
The novel is set in the days leading up to Thanksgiving Day, 2000 with Frank anticipating the family meal with his son and daughter and their respective partners. A series of mishaps and missteps complicate this relatively mundane event giving Frank even more cause to reflect that his life is gradually careering off course. An old friend comments that Frank “is not vital anymore“, meaning that the fire that could drive him to relish risk taking is now just a faint flicker.
This tale could, with a lesser writer, be a catalogue of woe and be a depressing read but Ford’s observations throughout are so astute and witty that even when the topic is dull, e.g as property prices or the Presidential election, there’s a rich vein of humour.This novel will be most appreciated by those (like me) who are approaching their mid-life crisis/challenge . I suspect that it will also appeal more to men than women. A fine book.
