The Life and Times of a Salesman

Richard Ford makes it easier to like America. Though “The Lay of the Land” (Knopf, 496 pages, $26.95) marches through great questions — cancer, maturity, and the presidential election of 2000 — the novel is in its gist a benevolent survey of the cluttered American landscape.Here, in the book’s first pages, Mr. Ford observes the off-season denizens of the Jersey shore:“Only the solitary-seeming winter residents, the slow joggers, the singledog walkers, the skinny men with metal detectors — their wives in the van waiting, reading John Grisham — these are who’s here.”Mr. Ford not only notices the wife who stays in the van, engrossed in her book, he also suggests that she has good reason to be there, tending her creature comfort away from the elements, while her skinny husband combs the beach. These people do not spoil the view, for Mr. Ford. He may not admire the woman in the minivan, but he makes her a part of his vision.In this novel, as in “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day,” Mr. Ford speaks through Frank Bascombe, a tough, ruminative divorcée who, by the beginning of this novel, has been left by his second wife and had his prostate injected with radioactive, cancer-fighting pellets.Bascombe has worked as a real estate agent since the second book in this trilogy, and he spends much of this book driving the roads of New Jersey, keeping an eye on the built environment, while he contemplates his Thanksgiving plans.“A mile into Montmorency County, 206 drops into a pleasant jungly sweetgum and red-clay creek bottom no one’s quite figured how to bulldoze yet,” he narrates, taking the lay of the land in chapter one. Because Bascombe, as a realtor, knows about zoning laws and demolition, his meditations on despoliation sound neither vain nor frantic. He can make even a blighted strip mall sound, in context, like a worthy human artifact.“We quickly rise again into the village of Belle Fleur, old-style Jersey, with a tall white Presbyterian steeple beside a sovereign little fenced cemetery, and just beyond a seventies-vintage strip development, with two pizza shops, a laundrette, a closed Squire Tux and an H&R Block — and across on the facing side of the road two deserted dusty-screened redbrick Depression houses (homes to humans once) from when 206 was a scenic rural pike as innocent and pristine as any back road in Kentucky.”That’s American history in a nutshell. The same incongruity of landscape inspires George Saunders to satires of a squalid American future, and sends Rick Moody gyring into lyrical history lessons. Mr. Ford has a lighter touch. Note his trademark combination of condescension and sympathy in the “sovereign little fenced cemetery.” Photo students would be dazzled by the tacky strip mall, but would they notice the Depression-era houses? About these Bacombe delivers a coup-de-grâce:“Another double-size wooden sign with big red lettering spells an end to the houses: OWNER WILL SELL, REMOVE OR TRADE. It’s a perfect site for a Jiffy Lube.”Wry as this prediction sounds, Bascombe avoids bitterness. He cannot afford it. He lives by selling expensive homes to small businessmen, whom he respects and whose dreams he has to encourage. American kitsch does not repel him; he understands its function. “I understand conventional wisdom,”he says, “I’m a salesman. Placebos work on me.”Meanwhile, Bascombe considers his Thanksgiving plans. The holiday will be a reckoning for the Bascombe family — as Christmas was for the Lamberts of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.” Like Mr. Franzen, Mr. Ford has contrived a plot that will maximize social commentary, sending Bascombe’s daughter to Harvard and then to a lesbian relationship in Manhattan, and sending Bascombe’s son to work for Hallmark in St. Louis.But where Franzen’s characters illustrated timely trends, opening restaurants in abandoned factories and gawking at the high price of groceries, Mr. Ford’s young people smell real. The Hallmark card-writer, Paul, affects retro-hipster fashions. But Bascombe does not say as much; to Bascombe his son is essentially “mainstream,” or at best ridiculous:“Paul, from somewhere, has found a strange suit — a too-large summerweight blue-gray-and-pink plaid with landing-strip lapels, gutter-deep cuffs and English vents — a style popular ten years before he was born and that everyone joked about even then. With his mullet, his uncouth beard-stache and ear stud, his suit makes him look like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He looks as if he could break out a ukelele and start crooning in an Al Jolson voice.”Mr. Ford has conjured contemporaneity and put it in its place — not without enjoying it meanwhile. His social criticism toes his sense of humor, which keeps him honest.“The Lay of the Land” is a great American novel that never resorts to paranoid hyperbole or beatific roadrunning. Bascombe, the seasoned salesman and the worn-out husband, is happy just to be a neutral observer.“The Lay of the Land” is a huge book, and like many epics can be too episodic. Not deeply moving, it at least convinces the reader that its picture of America is real and will do all of us a service, like the time capsule Paul buries at its end, near the beach.blytal@nysun.com

The Life and Times of a Salesman

The Life and Times of a Salesman

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