Land's end

The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford
Knopf, 496 pp., $26.95

So he's back, thank heavens, that essential dreamer and cheerful melancholic who's provided a tour of the American landscape over the past two decades. When Richard Ford introduced us to Frank Bascombe, in his 1986 novel, ``The Sportswriter," his protagonist was in his late 30s; a novelist manqu é turned freelance journalist, he had survived divorce and the death of a son but somehow kept on going. ``Independence Day," a decade later, found him selling real estate in Haddam, N.J., trying to navigate a dicey housing market and the equally volatile job of parenting. With ``The Lay of the Land," the trilogy takes on the foothills and crevasses of middle age. It is the most garrulous and unchecked of the Bascombe novels but also the most reflective, sometimes the most bountiful. If ``The Sportswriter" broke one's heart (and it did), ``The Lay of the Land" consoles it -- not by fortune-cookie wisdom or happy endings, but with its profound and full-hearted perception. By now, Frank has stayed upright through most of his life, faced down regret , and embraced the clarity of experience over the more glib idea of transient joy. These are good choices for a middle-aged white guy in an empty ocean front house the week before Thanksgiving, particularly when he has prostate cancer and a second wife who's missing in action.

And oh, that Bascombe. The man is captivating, cantankerous, exasperating, charming when he doesn't mean to be , and funny when he does. He's slow-tempered but opinionated, railing about everything from the recent election (it's 2000, and he voted for Gore, of course) to the strip-mining attitude behind most things we call progress: the recycled nature of the real estate market, the Office Depot encroachment of the Jersey shore, the ornery attitudes of housing clients and guys in bars and bland telemarketers. The voice is everything in ``The Lay of the Land," and it insinuates itself into the reader's consciousness with the sneaky intractability of marriage -- it's a deeply intimate narrative, in other words, convincing even when it's irritating. Frank can hold forth on oil futures and global economies and urban architecture, then turn to Theodore Roethke while musing about death (``so take the lively air, the poet said" ); when he half-apologizes later that he's read plenty of poets, he includes the caveat that he finds their books easy to finish. Always a self-deprecating guy.

But then death does concentrate the mind, and these days Frank is paying attention full tilt; the radioactive titanium cruising his prostate, compliments of the Mayo Clinic, has guaranteed that. So has Sally Caldwell's disappearance: Former girlfriend, now second wife, she wandered off a few months ago with her space-cadet first husband, who resurfaced after having been presumed dead for decades. Frank has accordingly circled the wagons a little: What's left of his coterie for this holiday week are his business partner, a Tibetan real estate agent named Mike who votes Republican and drives an Infiniti, and Frank's two kids -- both grown, both showing up for Thanksgiving with their new lovers and old grudges in tow.

Clarissa, who loves her dad well and unequivocally, has a life résumé Frank appreciates: Harvard, lesbian maybe, kind-hearted to a fault. His son, Paul, was the ``difficult" child -- now an angry, socially inept young man who writes card copy for Hallmark in Kansas City and who seems to loathe Frank as thoroughly as his dad tries to love him. Ann Dykstra, golf instructor and first wife extraordinaire over in neighboring Haddam, is threatening to show up for the catered turkey; Frank is dealing with these familial pressures by throwing himself into his work. In the middle-class vernacular of the sales business that drives the American beast, this means driving from one place to another, stopping for a beer or a bathroom break, and talking -- talking politics, talking numbers, talking trash.

``The Lay of the Land," like all the Bascombe novels, unfolds in a first-person narrative, and one of its pleasures is the reminder that Ford can do conversation -- not just straightforward, revelatory dialogue, but the shorthand, crusty, idiomatic way that guys, particularly business guys, talk to one another. This was a trick displayed in all its finery in ``Independence Day," and here, too, there are terrific cameos of Frank in his milieu -- with Mike the Buddhist capitalist, or a sweet young mechanic reading Fitzgerald, or clients who seek to quench their yearning with the good old reliable American metaphor of real estate. The novel displays a tapestry of such detail: the bars and McMansions and little ranch houses along this part of New Jersey, the Olive Gardens and gas stations and burial grounds that constitute the landscape of forward motion. It's all here, and if sometimes there's too much of it -- get out of the car, Frank, you want to say, get us back to the garden -- at least this loose and baggy monster is in chinos and a V-neck sweater.

With his introspective, mostly genial mobility, Frank insists to us that he has finally landed in what he calls the Permanent Period -- his spin on that Eriksonian stage of cohesion, or integration, when ``very little you say comes in quotes, when few contrarian voices mutter doubts in your head . . . and when who you feel yourself to be is pretty much how people will remember you once you've croaked." All three of the novels in Ford's trilogy circle the holidays: ``The Sportswriter," with its lost boy, was Easter week; ``Independence Day," its remaining son breaking free, was over the Fourth of July. ``The Lay of the Land," conscious of all the gifts, ironies, and iniquities of Thanksgiving, is about not gratitude but acceptance. And the first and final test of acceptance, as any Buddhist or human who has lived long enough will tell you, is death -- the life transformed, ``become alloyed with loss." That descriptor, all shimmer and depth, is not entirely bad news, and it's pure Bascombe -- eloquently poised between the points of beauty and sorrow.

The death that hovered throughout ``The Sportswriter" -- Ralph , the son who died of Reyes at age 9 -- is by now more an embraced mystery than a spectral tragedy, and that evolution goes to the heart of the progress of this trilogy. Even with its sometimes desultory nature, the last half of ``The Lay of the Land" is so rich -- so filled with insight, humor, and stylistic grace -- that I didn't want this long and winding trail to end. Frank doesn't either, and that is the alarming gift he has been given through his suffering: ``It's that other thing great nature promises that I rely on," he tells us, invoking Roethke, ``the thing that quickens the step and the breath and so must not be thought of as the enemy." Yes, you think, at moments like this in the wildly wise ``Lay of the Land," this is the conversation that matters most and that you wanted to have. The transience of life may be the great unbearable lesson; but the truly unbearable, as it turns out, is usually transient, too.