My kind of guy - Rated 
I wasn't always sure what was going on for Frank Bascombe in this book and sometimes I stopped to ask myself why I was enjoying these 700+ pages so much. I think it was to do with the fact that I like this man. I felt when I had finished that a friend of mine had moved away to another country. Exactly my age, I was glad to see that one of my contemporaries had some of the bewilderment which seems to be a part of my own life. Slow, gentle, thoughtful. This book took me through the first part of a wet, Scottish winter! Much needed. I could have gone on for another 300 pages.
Frank is Rich - Rated
Proof (if proof were needed) that Ford can be bracketed with Roth, Bellow and Updike as exponents of the extended 20th century Great American Novel. On meeting, Ford's southern charm is evident, but his famously prickly hubris and hauteur has made him less prolific than his forebears and contemporaries. Though his recent 'Women with Men' garnered deservedly mixed reviews, here, with the effort evident on each page, Ford delivers one of the most enjoyable and insightful books of the last decade. There is an original use of language and phraseology, a modernity which to some extent alienates us from his 60ish narrator but distances Ford from his competition.
Frank (ex-'Sportswriter') Bascombe is not - as Ford rightly denies - an alter ego, though both live on the East Coast and are comfortably late middle-aged. Frank now is seriously wealthy, rocketing property prices inflating the value of both his NJ shore real estate business and his own ocean view mansion. Counterpointing this are continuing unresolved issues, this novel being set (like the Faulkner / Pulitzer winning 'Independence Day') around a traditional holiday where Frank's age and sentimentalism augurs a crisis.
Frank's prolonged internal soliloquy takes up most of the wordage. It contains some of the most sublime self-consciousness, and self-deception. He is successful, gung-ho and energetic. Money is made and lost almost carelessly. But while he has a peripatetic business partner, his life partners are estranged, and his children distant and bewildering. His failing health is a critical subtext: Frank has prostate cancer (treatable). But there are references to heart murmurs and palpitations, which are less evidence of coronary disease, rather unacknowledged stress and incipient nervous disorder and potential breakdown.
All considered, it is a better novel than 'Independence Day'. The odd denouement detracts a little from this wonderful book; but one reads to the end, which is Ford's stated invocation of success as a writer. In part because the end is unsatisfying, tetralogy beckons: Merry Christmas Mr Bascombe? Bascombe at Rest?
Lay of the Land is hopefully final chapter of Bascombe. - Rated 
Highly uninspiring and hopefully end of story for Frank Bascombe. This book hits the laws of diminishing returns -- originally out of the 'dirty realism' school, Ford was celebratory with his realism with the Sportswriter. Indepence Day was a nice build on it. However, Bascombe by the time we get to Lay of the Land is a complete jerk. I had no sympathy for him. Or any of the characters. When the earlier books had a sense of wonder about the world, Lay of the Land has none. The wisdom that Ford tries to give us through Bascombe comes off as rambling. The end was ridiculous, like a bad John Irving plotline (Russian twins kill his neighbours and shoots Bascombe, at the very moment, he is going to rescue his formerly gay daughter from the clutches of the polcie for running down a highwayman? -- please.) Ford still writes beautifully but ultimately has nothing to say anymore. Thus the one star. If anything, this book made me mourn for Carver.
Now I lay me down to sleep... - Rated 
Richard Ford has impeccable taste in fiction, as we know from his introductions to UK editions of James Salter's Light Years and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. He also enjoys greatness by association with his old friends, the late Raymond Carver and the not late (except when it comes to turning out novels) Tobias Wolff. And his last collection of stories, A Multitude of Sins, was a delight. But I get the impression that what he wants to be remembered for are the Frank Bascombe novels: The Sportswriter (1984), Independence Day (1995) and now The Lay of the Land. A clue to this comes in the early pages of chapter 1, where the uncommon word angstrom appears. Of course! It's Rabbit by Richard.
And The Lay of the Land does seem more than either of the others to be Ford's attempt to square up to Updike and give the world his own Harry Angstrom. It seems less interested in doing something new (it copies the structure of Independence Day: the detailed moment-by-moment recreation of the days approaching a public holiday - this time Thanksgiving - and a dramatic event near the end), and is content to examine Bascombe's life with positively forensic attention.
This is not without event - Bascombe gets involved along the way in a bar brawl, a terrorist attack, and several switchbacks of his present and previous love lives - but there's no denying that it does get at times extremely boring. It's hard to tell whether this is deliberate - Frank after all is an estate agent and not a man given to outbursts of emotion - and at times this quality made it the ideal holiday read, as I had nothing else with me to put it down for. Ford's prose is not the match of Updike's, or Salter's for that matter, and in storytelling circles Yates leaves him standing.
Nonetheless the book was not at all a difficult or reluctant read, and there are moments of brilliant observation, such as this assessment of Bascombes' Tibetan employee, Mike Mahoney:
"In this, he's like many of our citizens, including the ones who go back to the Pilgrims: He's armed himself with just enough information, even if it's wrong, to make him believe that what he wants he deserves, that bafflement is a form of curiosity and that these two together form an inner strength that should let him pick all the low-hanging fruit."
This also plays into the Rabbitesque background to the book: the recounts and court challenges to the 2000 Bush/Gore election, which gives Ford a chance to put some choice anti-Bushisms in Bascombe's mouth.
Finally, there is the inevitable impressed satisfaction of reading any book this length, that the author should have managed to sustain the performance for so long, even if we didn't always enjoy it that much (or perhaps, as Forster once suggested, we tend to overpraise long books simply because we have got through them). Oh, and a word about that: my obsession with flagrant page-bloat has been mentioned before, but I think swelling the page count from 496 in the hardback to 726 in the paperback sets a new record. Unless of course you are even more anally retentive than I am about things like that, and know better.
Frank enters the Permanent Period - Rated
Lay of the Land is the third novel in which Richard Ford charts the life of Frank Bascombe. Frank is now in his fifties, and is a realtor (an estate agent) on the coast of New Jersey. He is in his second marriage and in the throes of what he calls the "Permanent Period", that stage of life where most things that can go wrong have already gone wrong, and where generally speaking things don't get messed up any more - at least in the catastrophic way that earlier stages are subject too.
Needless to say, the Permanent Period turns out to be no protection from family squalls and rifts, and even second marriages, seemingly so settled can go badly and unexpectedly wrong. And then there's always prostate cancer, to make sure that Frank has to make adjustments to those areas of his life so far unaffected.
The charm of this novel, like its predecessors, is that nothing much happens. Frank is allowed to tell his story in his usual meandering way. A trip into town can give rise to pages of observations and reflections, somewhat in the way of W G Sebald, or even Marcel Proust. What makes this work is that Frank has a wondrously philosophical attitude to life, not one that insulates him from problems, but one which enables him to interpret them and live through them in an almost Buddhist way, where trouble is rarely confronted full on, but rather side-stepped and averted by Frank's huge tolerance and patience. The reader finds him/herself drifting along with Frank, and can find himself saying, hey, this approach might work with me too, if only I wasn't so uptight and frantic. Richard Ford has cast Frank's real-estate assistant as a Tibetan Buddhist immigrant, called (unusually) Mike Mahoney. It is interesting to see as the book develops, that maybe Frank is the better Buddhist than this disciple of the Dalai Llama.
Frank is a completely believable character, and although the book only covers a period of a few days, it is full of incidents that show how Frank deals with his family and friends. By the end, readers will have learned a lot about what makes him tick, and maybe like me, they will think that Frank may be quite a good guy to know, and maybe they could learn something about dealing with the huge amounts of stuff that has to be dealt with in the course of a fairly routine life. Highly recommended - if you like this kind of thing, and I do.
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