Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007
A Case of Development
By Claire Messud
The Lay of the Land
by Richard Ford
Knopf, 485 pp., $26.95
For twenty years, Frank Bascombe has wandered his way through the prosperous suburbs of New Jersey and the American literary landscape, reflecting, reacting, and simply getting on with his life. He first appeared in Richard Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter, set in 1983: a divorced thirty-eight-year-old with a quietly held tragedy, an eye for the ladies, and an affable engagement with his late-century anomie. In Independence Day, published ten years later but set in 1988, he had switched professions—from sportswriter to realtor—and although he dithered, still, in matters romantic, he was at pains, albeit haplessly, to show his engaged love for his adolescent children, Clarissa and, primarily, his troubled son Paul.
Review, 3700 words
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