We first met Frank Bascombe in 1986 when Richard Ford wrote The Sportswriter. We met up with him again a decade later in Independence Day, which won Ford both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Happily, Frank is back in The Lay of the Land, which was a finalist this spring for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle fiction award, won by Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss.
Ford has a thing for significant dates. The Sportswriter takes place over Easter and Independence Day unfolds on a Fourth of July weekend. It's approaching Thanksgiving when The Lay of the Land opens. It's 2000 and our hapless former sportswriter is still selling real estate on the New Jersey shore.
Sales are booming, but Frank, who is now 55, has little to be thankful for. The U.S. presidential election hangs in the balance with the Florida recount. Frank voted for Gore.
Closer to home, he is struggling with a serious medical problem. And as if prostate cancer isn't enough, he's still reeling from the disappearance a few months earlier of his former girlfriend and second wife, Sally, who returned to the arms of her first husband.
Then there's the prospect of the Guess Who's Coming to Thanksgiving Dinner involving his adult children, Clarissa and Paul, who come armed with new lovers and old complaints. Rounding out the guest list is first wife, Ann, a golf instructor.
Against the backdrop of New Jersey -- which comes to life like a National Geographic documentary devoted to suburban bungalows and mansions, bars and gas stations, big box stores and strip malls -- our hero fights the banal demons that haunt middle age.
What makes the Bascombe trilogy so engaging is the subtle and nuanced way in which Ford paints his contemporary Everyman, caught up as he is in the human predicament, with all its complexity and perplexity.
Frank Bascombe is one of the great talkers in contemporary U.S. fiction, thanks to Ford's felicity with external dialogue and interior monologue.
When we hear Frank talk -- and we do hear rather than read him talk -- we hear the voice of America, or more precisely, the voice of middle aged, white, male America in all its marred and scarred splendour.
There's a certain cachet attached to literary writers who place the same protagonist in a series of books. Frank Bascombe joins the ranks of John Updike's Harry Rabbit Angstrom and Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman as not only a celebrated character, but an emblematic signpost on the long and winding road that was America in the last half of the 20th century.
Ford has said he is now through with telling the story of Frank Bascombe. Granted, setting The Lay of the Land at the turn of the new millennium gives him a convenient place to retire the character. And the novel is elegiac, pleasingly mournful in tone.
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