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. Continue reading
