Fiction:We first met Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, published 20 years ago - and what a lot has happened, to America and to the wider world, in those two decades. Frank was 38 in that first book and a lot had happened in his life already.
He had been living in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey, for 14 years, in "a large Tudor house" - early hint of a future career in that particularity - bought with the proceeds of a movie deal on a book of short stories he had written. He had been married, too, with children, one of them dead and two surviving, and was now divorced from the wife referred to throughout The Sportswriter as X, but whose name, we will later learn, is Ann Dykstra. After the short stories, he had written half of a short novel, but abandoned it when the editor of a New York sports magazine offered him a job as a sportswriter. His life, he declared, had not been a bad one; indeed, "in most ways it's been great". Yet Frank was always a realist:
. . . if sportswriting teaches you anything, and there is much truth to it as well as plenty of lies, it is that for your life to be worth anything you must sooner or later face the possibility of terrible, searing regret. Though you must also manage to avoid it or your life will be ruined.
I believe I have done these two things. Faced down regret. Avoided ruin. And I am still here to tell about it.
The Sportswriter was set over an Easter weekend; its successor, Independence Day, also takes place during a national holiday, the Fourth of July. At the close of his first outing Frank had observed that "life has only one certain closure", and sure enough, 10 years later we find him in transformed circumstances, still living in the mild town of Haddam, no longer writing, now, but selling real estate for the firm of Lauren-Schwindell, and making a rake of money in the middle of Clinton's boom-and-boom 1990s, though "falling property values now ride through the trees like an odorless, colorless mist . . . "
His divorced wife, Ann, has remarried, and is living in Connecticut with her new husband and her and Frank's two children, their delightful daughter Clarissa, and Paul, who is a teenager and emotionally troubled. As the book opens, "I'm setting off on a weekend trip with my only son, which promises, unlike most of my seekings, to be starred by weighty life events". As it turns out, Frank never said a truer word.
Now comes The Lay of the Land, the third and, so its author has declared, final volume in a trilogy. It is the week of Thanksgiving in the year 2000, and the US is watching with more or less appalled fascination the process by which the Bush camp is stealing the election from the Democrats - a very American kind of coup. Frank is still in the realty business, though he has left Lauren-Schwindell and started up a business of his own in partnership with an immigrant Tibetan called Mike Mahoney - yes, he is Tibetan, yes, he is called Mike Mahoney.
Frank is now 55, and life's events are weighing more heavily than ever upon him. His second wife, Sally, whom we met in Independence Day before she was his wife, has left him to return to her supposedly long-dead first husband - it is a complicated story - while his first wife Ann, a professional golf instructor and now widowed, has taken to leaving wistful messages on Frank's answering machine declaring that she still loves him and that it might be a good idea for them to get together again.
As far as Frank's children are concerned, the bright spot is that his daughter Clarissa, fresh out of a lesbian affair and dating men again, has come to live with him in his beach-side house in Sea-Clift, down the New Jersey shore from Haddam; the dim spot is that his now adult son Paul, who earns his living writing offbeat captions for Hallmark greeting cards, is coming to spend Thanksgiving with his Dad, bringing along his one-handed girlfriend and his increasingly heavy sack of wonky woes. And then there is Frank's prostate cancer . . .
Despite all this, or because of it, Frank feels he has reached a kind of equilibrium in his life:
I've graduated to the spiritual concision of the Permanent Period, the time of life when very little you say comes in quotes, when few contrarian voices mutter doubts in your head, when the past seems more generic than specific, when life's a destination more than a journey and when who you feel yourself to be is pretty much how people will remember you once you've croaked - in other words, when personal integration . . . is finally achieved.
The sprightly Emersonian note here is intentional. Quotes from Emerson, many of them unacknowledged, are studded throughout the book like plums in a pudding, and indeed it might be said that Emerson is the reigning spirit in all three volumes of the trilogy. This will pass over the heads of many Europeans, for Europe knows little about American life and next to nothing about American philosophy. Anyone outside the United States who wishes to understand that great wounded and wounding monster of a country should first off be sat down and made to read, and reread, Emerson's three key essays, The American Scholar, Experience and, in this context the most significant of the three, Self-Reliance. Here is Frank Bascombe's take on the Emersonian unillusioned affirmative:
I do not credit the epiphanic, the seeing-through that reveals all, triggered by a mastering detail. These are lies of the liberal arts to distract us from the more precious here and now. Life's moments truly come at us heedless, not at the bidding of a gilded fragrance. The Permanent Period is specifically commissioned to combat these indulgences into the pseudo-significant. We're all separate agents, each underlain by an infinite remoteness; and to the extent we're not and require to be significant, we're not so interesting.
Or as the Sage of Concord himself pithily puts it, "We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them".
Frank's skates, however, have suddenly let him down, and he has come something of a cropper. He is as pragmatic as it is possible to be in the face of death - his cancer is in remission, but he knows it is unlikely to remain so for long - and yet he has his moments when, in the words of Philip Larkin, the realisation of his predicament "rages out/ In furnace-fear" and he snarls at the world and its fatuous reassurances: "Good was a lie, inasmuch as my whole grasp on life required that nothing terrible happen to me, ever - which is nuts. It did."
Yet for all the tolling of the dark bell, The Lay of the Land is the liveliest book in the trilogy. Frank, like Leopold Bloom, is ceaselessly curious about the world and the peculiar people in it. Nothing and no one is too insignificant to attract his attention. One of the prime pleasures of The Lay of the Land is the delight it takes in the minutiae of life as we live it now on our dwindling planet. And above all there is the US. Ford the novelist loves the country, loves its swagger and sprawl, its exaggerations, its refusal to be anything other than thoroughly too much, and in return the country gives him of its bounty. Not since Lolita has America the Beautiful, Bushes or no Bushes, been so lovingly celebrated.
THE BOOK IS also very funny - in places laugh-out-loud funny. Ford used to like to pose as a bit of a gun-toting hard man, but really all along he was what he so obviously is now: an artist, a wit and a dandy, however monstrously bulging his muscles may be. Much of the comedy is in the style, for Ford writes what is surely the most fluid, adaptable and subtle prose of any of the contemporary American novelists, Updike included. If you want a taste of the book, go into a bookshop, pick it up and open it at page 259 and read the final paragraph there, which is one of Frank Bascombe's grandstand rants, a maniacally detailed anathema of Clarissa's latest man, the horribly plausible Thom - "Thom is known to me and to all men - fathers, especially - and loathed" - and then try walking out of the shop without buying it.
Although the action takes place over only three days, the canvas is broad and teeming with characters, many of them richly comic. There is the Tibetan Mike Mahoney, for instance, who is not in any way a caricature - in fact, he is one of the most rounded and subtly drawn characters in the book - yet a source of much fond good humour in this surprisingly fond and good-humoured book. A running gag is Mike's never less than surprising sartorial sense: "He looks like a dashboard doll, since he's wearing a strange knee-length black knitted sweater with a mink-looking collar, a Black Watch plaid sports-car cap, green cords and green suede loafers with argyle socks. It would seem to be his Scottish ensemble."
The Lay of the Land is a modern American masterpiece. Ford has found a mode of describing contemporary life which is as revolutionary in its way as anything in Proust or Joyce. In Frank Bascombe he has created the perfect conduit through which to run the story of our times. It is too early to attempt a definitive judgment of the trilogy - that must wait on posterity - but in the interim it can be said that taken together these three books constitute a rich, dense and wholly convincing portrait of the US at the close of the millennium, and seem set to stand as one of the true works of art of our benighted era.
The Lay of the Land By Richard Ford Bloomsbury, 485pp. £17.99
Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black, the first in a series of thrillers by John Banville under a pen-name, was published this autumn