The Lay Of The Land

The new masterpiece from one of America's greatest novelists. Frank Bascombe is back. The protagonist of Richard Ford's acclaimed novels, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, is now in his late middle age. Recovering from cancer, he looks back on his marriages, friendships, children and career. Elegant, melancholic, full of understated irony, The Lay of the Land is a remarkable portrait of a seemingly ordinary man as he assesses the life he has led. STAFF REVIEW Cormac McCarthy's The Road was the sort of book that, having finished it, you knew you had just been privileged with one of the most singular and affecting reading experiences any writer has produced in recent years. Lay of the Land is another beast altogether - we are not at the outer edge of imaginable experience for a start! -but what an absolute joy it is! The final instalment in a projected trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and was followed by Independence Day, we find Mr Ford here at what to me is his very finest form: acute (as always) social observation of contemporary affluenza; and a (still) utterly endearing protagonist in realtor Frank Bascombe (who like most of us has more than enough mental trash but now, at the age of 55, has entered what he calls his 'permanent period', where life is an altogether more buddhist "time of being, not becoming"). There are some sometimes quite poignant scenes in the book, but not infrequently too there are many laugh-out-loud funny moments - much more than I can remember in Ford before. And although perhaps not a lot happens in this definitely capacious, leisurely book - what plot there is revolves around a family thanksgiving weekend - the experience of reading it makes me compare it to "grazing" at a favourite restaurant - we just love being in this world and with this character! Ford doesn't provide any answers to the conundrums of modern life, but in Bascombe has created a character whose dreams and doubts about life, its possibilities and - yes, afraid so! - limitations make the book deserve to be considered (another) modern American classic! Martin Shaw is from Readings Carlton About the Author: "Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published five novels and three collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins and The Lay of the Land, published by Bloomsbury in 2006. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction."