The third installment, after The Sportswriter and Independence Day , of "an extraordinary epic."* This new novel from Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award-winner Richard Ford marks the return of Frank Bascombe, one of the most beloved characters in American fiction. The time: The Fall of 2000 with the presidential election on-going and Thanksgiving looming with all its own perils, from the post-nuclear family get-together to explosions that will leave listeners gasping. The place: The Jersey shore, where Frank Bascombe now plies his trade as a realtor. Laugh-out-loud funny, THE LAY OF THE LAND is sure to be an instant classic. *The Times of London
The third installment, after The Sportswriter and Independence Day , of "an extraordinary epic."* This new novel from Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award-winner Richard Ford marks the return of Frank Bascombe, one of the most beloved characters in American fiction. The time: The Fall of 2000 with the presidential election on-going and Thanksgiving looming with all its own perils, from the post-nuclear family get-together to explosions that will leave listeners gasping. The place: The Jersey shore, where Frank Bascombe now plies his trade as a realtor. Laugh-out-loud funny, THE LAY OF THE LAND is sure to be an instant classic. *The Times of London
The Lay of the Land (Frank Bascombe Series #3)
The Lay of the Land (Frank Bascombe Series #3)
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Overview
The third installment, after The Sportswriter and Independence Day , of "an extraordinary epic."* This new novel from Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner award-winner Richard Ford marks the return of Frank Bascombe, one of the most beloved characters in American fiction. The time: The Fall of 2000 with the presidential election on-going and Thanksgiving looming with all its own perils, from the post-nuclear family get-together to explosions that will leave listeners gasping. The place: The Jersey shore, where Frank Bascombe now plies his trade as a realtor. Laugh-out-loud funny, THE LAY OF THE LAND is sure to be an instant classic. *The Times of London
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780739339770 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Books on Tape, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/07/2006 |
| Series: | Frank Bascombe Series , #3 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
February 16, 1944Place of Birth:
Jackson, MississippiEducation:
B.A., Michigan State University, 1966; M.F.A., University of California, Irvine, 1970Read an Excerpt
Part 1
Toms River, across the Barnegat Bay, teems out ahead of me in the blustery winds and under the high autumnal sun of an American Thanksgiving Tuesday. From the bridge over from Sea-Clift, sunlight diamonds the water below the girdering grid. The white-capped bay surface reveals, at a distance, only a single wet-suited jet-skier plowing and bucking along, clinging to his devil machine as it plunges, wave into steely wave. "Wet and chilly, bad for the willy," we sang in Sigma Chi, "Dry and warm, big as a baby's arm." I take a backward look to see if the NEW JERSEY'S BEST KEPT SECRET sign has survived the tourist season--now over. Each summer, the barrier island on which Sea-Clift sits at almost the southern tip hosts six thousand visitors per linear mile, many geared up for sun 'n fun vandalism and pranksterish grand theft. The sign, which our Realty Roundtable paid for when I was chairman, has regularly ended up over the main entrance of the Rutgers University library, up in New Brunswick. Today, I'm happy to see it's where it belongs.
New rows of three-storey white-and-pink condos line the mainland shore north and south. Farther up toward Silver Bay and the state wetlands, where bald eagles perch, the low pale-green cinder-block human-cell laboratory owned by a supermarket chain sits alongside a white condom factory owned by Saudis. At this distance, each looks as benign as Sears. And each, in fact, is a good-neighbor clean- industry-partner whose employees and executives send their kids to the local schools and houses of worship. Management puts a stern financial foot down on drugs and pedophiles. Their campuses are well landscaped and policed. Both stabilize the tax base and provide locals a few good yuks.
From the bridge span I can make out the Toms River yacht basin, a forest of empty masts wagging in the breezes, and to the north, a smooth green water tower risen behind the husk of an old nuclear plant currently for sale and scheduled for shutdown in 2002. This is our eastern land view across from the Boro of Sea-Clift, and frankly it is a positivist's version of what landscape-seascape has mostly become in a multi-use society.
This morning, I'm driving from Sea-Clift, where I've abided the last eight years, across the sixty-five-mile inland trek over to Haddam, New Jersey, where I once lived for twenty, for a day of diverse duties--some sobering, some fearsome, one purely hopeful. At 12:30, I'm paying a funeral-home visitation to my friend Ernie McAuliffe, who died on Saturday. At four, my former wife, Ann Dykstra, has asked to "meet" me at the school where she works, the prospect of which has ignited piano-wire anxiety as to the possible subjects--my health, her health, our two grown and worrisome children, the surprise announcement of a new cavalier in her life (an event ex-wives feel the need to share). I also mean to make a quick stop by my dentist's for an on-the-fly adjustment to my night guard (which I've brought). And I have a Sponsor appointment at two--which is the hopeful part.
Sponsors is a network of mostly central New Jersey citizens--men and women--whose goal is nothing more than to help people (female Sponsors claim to come at everything from a more humanistic/nurturing angle, but I haven't noticed that in my own life). The idea of Sponsoring is that many people with problems need nothing more than a little sound advice from time to time--not problems you'd visit a shrink for, or take drugs to cure, or that requires a...
Reading Group Guide
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Best Book of the Year
“Ford once again shows why he deserves to be hailed as one of the great American fiction novelists of his generation.”
—The Washington Post Book World
The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are meant to enliven your group’s discussion of Richard Ford’s abundant, funny, sorrowful, and miraculously observed new novel, The Lay of the Land.
1. What do you make of the story that opens the novel: that of the community college teacher who, before being gunned down by one of her disgruntled students, was asked if she was ready to meet her maker and replied “Yes. Yes, I think I am” [p. 3]. Why is Frank so riveted by this question? How does he think he might answer in similar circumstances? What does he mean when he says that “It’s not a question . . . that suburban life regularly poses to us. Suburban life, in fact, pretty much does the opposite” [p. 4]? Is he right? How do the themes of death, self-accounting, and the terrifying randomness of the American berserker recur throughout The Lay of the Land?
2. What does Bascombe mean by the “Permanent Period?” When does he seem to have entered it, and what events threaten to evict him from it? How serious is he when he speaks of its pleasures? In the scheme of this novel, is permanence the same thing as happiness? As resignation?
3. The Lay of the Land is set during Thanksgiving, as The Sportswriter takes place at Easter and Independence Day over a July 4th weekend. How does the holiday figure in the novel? How does Frank feel about it, and how do the other characters appear to be celebrating it? Discuss the novel’s exploration of themes like gratitude, family, and abundance—as well as the ambiguous meaning of “pilgrim.”
4. What role does politics play in this novel, which occurs during the long, inconclusive hangover of the 2000
presidential election? How does Frank feel about the nation’s current state of affairs? How do the other characters feel, and to what extent are they characterized by their politics? How does the outcome (or non-outcome) of the vote mirror events in Frank’s personal life?
5. What has prompted Frank to become a Sponsor, a member of a group “whose goal is nothing more than to help people” [p. 12]? What sort of help does he have in mind, and how does that correspond to what is actually asked of him on his one Sponsorial visit? What does he get from his voluntarism, and how do the services he performs as a Sponsor compare to his kindnesses as a friend, business partner, father, or husband? How do they highlight his failings and deficiencies? What does the very existence of an organization like Sponsors suggest about
American—or at least New Jerseyan—society in the year 2000?
6. What is the significance of Frank’s career as a realtor? Which of his character traits does it bring into relief? How does it cause him to see the landscape and houses around him, and how does it cause other characters to see him? What does “home” mean to a realtor, who makes his living selling them? What might “home” mean to Frank’s partner Mike Mahoney (né Lobsang Dhargey), whose original one was in Tibet? Is home, as Frank can’t keep from going back to, though the air there’s grown less breathable, the future’s over, where they really don’t want you back, and where you once left on a breeze without a rearward glance” [p. 14]?
7. Mike Mahoney’s name, career-track, and politics suggest a core sample of the American bedrock, except that, as previously mentioned, he happens to be a Buddhist from Tibet. Has the American archetype become someone who was once somebody (or something) else? In what ways are Mike and Frank similar? Are Ford’s characters constantly becoming new people or simply building additions onto an original structure? And, if Mike represents a paradigm in this novel, what do you make of Ann’s statement, “We just have to be who we are” [p. 377]?
8. Frank is a cancer survivor, a category whose ambiguity may be surpassed only by the “suicide survivors” that so confuse Mike. How does Frank feel about his condition, and particularly about where it has chosen to turn up in his body?
9. What sort of father is Frank? Which of his surviving children does he favor and for what reasons? To what extent is he still haunted by the death of his first son? Why is he so unnerved when Clarissa, who only yesterday was a straightforward lesbian, brings home a male “friend”? What might account for Frank’s embarrassment and irritation toward his son Paul and Paul’s occasional fury at him? Is Paul right when he accuses his father of “hold[ing] everything . . . down” [p. 396]?
10. How does Frank relate to the women in his life? What sort of husband has he been? How does he react to Ann’s admission that she still loves him? How has he dealt with his desertion by Sally, and to what extent may he have been complicit in it? (What might it mean when your wife leaves you for a dead man?) What do you make of his Sponsorial call to Marguerite Purcell and of the fact that it transpires without either person alluding to their long-ago sexual fling?
11. For all his relationships, Bascombe seems to be a fundamentally solitary figure. Is this because Ford embeds us so deeply in his consciousness that we experience the essential aloneness that is the hallmark of all consciousness or because Frank really is solitary? What traits or circumstances might make him so?
12. As its title suggests, The Lay of the Land is very much a novel about place. How does Bascombe view his neck of New Jersey? How do his observations about strip malls, McMansions, road houses, and human tissue banks illuminate Bascombe’s character? How do they comment on the novel’s action? Does Bascombe loathe the uniformity and ugliness of this environment, or are his feelings about them more complex? Are the author’s? What is the significance of the fox that appears in one of the book’s final scenes?
13. E. M. Forster famously summed up the difference between story and plot as follows: “‘The King died, then the Queen died’ is the story. ‘The King died, then the Queen died of grief’ is the plot” [Aspects of the Novel, chapter 5]. What is it that makes the seemingly haphazard events in this novel cohere into a plot? What is the relation between that plot’s hinges (Frank’s cancer, Sally’s departure, Ann’s confession, Clarissa’s disappearance, and Paul’s arrival, not to mention the shattering denouement) and its seemingly incidental moments?
14. Frank is both the novel’s protagonist and its narrator. Every perception and event is filtered through his voice. How would you characterize Frank’s voice? In what ways does it combine the casual and the literary, the comic and the tragic?
15. Because The Lay of the Land deals with ordinary people engaged in ordinary life in an environment that most readers will find familiar, it is tempting to see it as a miniaturist novel. But its length, its eventfulness, and the sheer, exuberant density of its observations suggest that it is also a work of fictional maximalism like Bellow’s Herzog or Joyce’s Ulysses (to which it sometimes alludes). Discuss these approaches to fiction and the ways that Ford reconciles, or navigates, between them.