From the Editor

In the first few hundred pages, there's not much that seems to be happening in Richard Ford's new book The Lay of the Land (2006), the 3d of the Frank Bascombe books, not like in the 3d of the Tom Swift, or Anne of Green Gables, or Harry Potter books, as they are about dramatic adventures about young people and fairly quick-reads.  Ford's Bascombe books are about the dramatic adventures of middle-aged Americans (males) who have had their illusions dashed through death, divorce, sickness, and career hopes that just didn't deliver on the oomph of epiphany or satisfaction.  So following the signs that follow, the book is written in the tone of SNAFU and SOL, the great American acronyms of negation, which are also the great straight men of American humor -- from Charlie Chaplin to Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman to Woody Allen and Richard Pryor.  Systems Normal All F'd Up -- "C'est merdique," and then goes the punchline, pratfall, the drum and cymbal.

And though tonally the book sounds like Eyeore on a holiday trying to enjoy himself, the book is very funny, in an Eeyore kind of way.

The Lay of the Land takes place afloat the sea of mid-life New Jersey, representative of the stuck-in-the-middle-with-high hopes class, surrounded by many pleasant-sounding place names that Realtors love to list -- Sea-Clift, Seaside Park, Seaside Heights.  In fact, our narrator Frank Bascombe has, since The Sportswriter (1986) which took place during three days at Easter, ditched his writing career and firmly rooted himself in the therapeutic occupation of Realtor, since Independence Day (1995) which took place during three days on the 4th of July holiday.  So again in The Lay of the Land Frank has put on the badge of this high calling -- real life, real deal, real politik, real love, real estate -- and sees himself as gatekeeper for all those who come to him anguishing over their important decisions of where to set up shop for the brief time they are on the planet and how much the monthly payments will be til real life (or life as we know it) forecloses on them.  Frank is making it real by putting the "real" into real estate, the only thing you can count on, so we are led to believe, but, of course, something we won't be around to realize, and something we spend enormous amounts of energy and money to deny.

Here in this novel, Frank narrates another oracular three-day run up to the greatest of American "normal" holidays -- Thanksgiving -- about which Frank has plenty to say: "Thanksgiving, of course, signals the beginning of the gloomy Christmas season, vale of aching hearts and unreal hopes, when more suicide successes, abandonments, spousal thumpings, care thefts, firearm discharges and emergency surgeries take place per twenty-four hour period than any other time of year except the day after the Superbowl."

Struggling with his (ours, mine, yours, does it matter) postmodern mind, Frank places great interpretive significance on statistics, the explosive minutiae of factoids, the small jumps in the market as harbingers of gravity or joy.  (Mostly gravity.)  As a result or a cause, we real-life readers in the new millennium have a profound distrust in the big tableau, the names of consequences, the great labels of history, and the great names of things to which all kinds of self-serving and cynically hidden motives have been attached.  In our case, this ranges from terror to trust, from freedom to fear, in other words, from making career choices, choosing people to love or to like, and even deciding what turns to take on the road to Ayden.  In Frank's case, it is a distrust of our great national holidays hyped to be symbols for something which we seldom experience in real life.

Frank, speaking through Ford or Ford speaking through Frank (however the Charlie McCarthy thing goes), also shows a profound distrust of the literary trust; that is, what books tell us to believe.  Frank tells us: "I do not credit the epiphanic, the seeing-through that reveals all, triggered by a mastering detail.  These are lies of the liberal arts to distract us from the more precious here and now.  Life's moments truly come at us heedless, not at the bidding of a gilded fragrance."  This game played between author and narrator, the abstraction versus the concrete, the grand versus the itty bitty, works every time.

As it is, in literature and in life, there seems to be too much neurosis to bear, no matter what age you find yourself, no matter what you call the holiday or ceremony.  Frank admits his neurosis in a roundabout way: "I don't feel panicky (though that could be a sure sign of panic)."  If nothing else, the book calls for a restoration of proportion to our lives, the same knowledge guaranteed if you attend any liberal arts graduation ceremony.  You can hear it in the voice of the graduating senior addressing her peers and friends and family, not in exactly what is said, but what is felt in the words -- how much hope there is in fear and fear in hope, a measure of a name, this place or that place, a degree, an achievement, and things yet to do,  making it real in the here and now.  Listening to Amanda Mizelle addressing the graduates, one could not argue her heart-felt answer to the soul's nightmare found among Frank Bascombe's anguished list of doubts: "That I've chosen a life smaller than my talent because a smaller life made me happier? (double check)," he says.

Rather, as Ms. Mizelle reminded us, these are the days and this is the place, where the great decisions of our lives are made, not in sign or symbol, but in the small, quiet moments of the heart, and where, as Ford concluding The Lay of the Land writes, "we can resume our human scale upon the land."

For an interesting interview with Ford, please see: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec06/ford_11-20.html