A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story announcing that Richard Ford, long-hanging ornament of the house of Knopf, was jumping ship to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. As far as these things go, this was pretty big news. Ford, after all, had been with Knopf for seventeen years, and with his editor there, Gary Fisketjon, for years before that. During his time there, he had published four books, including Independence Day, the first novel to win the PEN award and the Pulitzer in the same year.
Ecco, by contrast, hasn’t exactly been an imprint famous for its big literary names. While they did recently put out a very beautiful series of Tobias Wolff reissues, and have a small but respectable poetry wing, they’ve also published Mario Batali’s Mario Tailgates NASCAR Style, Aromas of Aleppo: The Legendary Cuisine of Syrian Jews by the fabulously Dickensian Poopa Dweck, and John Leguizamo’s woefully forgotten autobiography Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends.
But buried under boilerplate platitudes from a Knopf representative and Ford’s agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban, there was the news that Ford’s new contract—which I imagine is preposterously lucrative—is for one book of short stories and two novels, the first of which is scheduled for 2010 and called, surprisingly, Canada. To elide a few of Ecco’s PR-ish hints, it seems to be both a violent tale of retribution and an adventure-based coming of age. (In an accompanying photo, Ford appeared wearing a khaki shirt and down-home suspenders, as if rearing for some adventure himself, though likely of the fly-fishing variety.) All this, and set in Saskatchewan, too.
All of which served as a reminder that Frank Bascombe, the narrator of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and, most recently, The Lay of the Land, is gone. And in a story in this week’s New Yorker, Ford reminds us further. It’s not that the story is bad—in its microcosmic vision of post-Katrina New Orleans, it’s nuanced and evocative. Ford continues his brilliant focus on the connective tissue of society (like The Lay of the Land, “Leaving for Kenosha” deals with dentists and real estate agents and greeting cards, the things, in other words, that we all encounter at some point, that we all share), but there’s no mistaking that Frank has left the building. Consider its opening sentences alongside those of “How Was It To Be Dead, an excerpt from The Lay of the Land that ran in the New Yorker just before the novel’s publication in late 2006:
“Leaving for Kenosha: “It was the anniversary of the disaster. Walter Hobbes was on his way uptown to pick up his daughter, Louise, at Trinity. She had the dentist at four.
“How Was It To Be Dead: “The exact status of my marriage to Sally Caldwell requires, I believe, some amplification. It is still a marriage that’s officially going on, yet by any accounting has become strange—in fact, the strangest I know, and within whose unusual circumstances I myself have acted very strangely.
An author, of course, is entitled to move on, and hopefully the change in direction will be fruitful. But Frank’s clear departure made another piece of news in the Times piece seem sort of sad: it turns out that his swan song, The Lay of the Land, was kind of a bomb. According to Nielsen BookScan, which accounts for roughly 70% of retail book sales, just 51,000 copies had been sold in hardcover and 36,000 in paperback. These numbers seem low for a book by a major writer that was, on the whole, well-received. (Despite a whining review by Michiko Kakutani, the Times still named it as one of their ten best books of the year.)
Why did it bomb? The obvious argument would be that the book is bad— Kakutani called it “lethargic and “formulaic—and there’s no accounting for opinion on that charge. But I think it also comes down to marketing. Independence Day hit the shelf in an orgy of patriotism, boasting two sets of stars and stripes on its cover, insuring that even those too illiterate to read the book’s Very Important Title would sense that it was about major issues like flags and America and stuff. And, basically, it is—find me another novel set on the Fourth of July in which a father and son go to Cooperstown, engaging all the while in detailed ruminations about the state of the nation and the nature of citizenry.
If one takes its cover as a guide, though, the fuzzy picture of the Atlantic shore makes The Lay of the Land seem concerned with nothing so much as nearsightedness; it looks more like the layers of an unappetizing dessert than the ocean itself. And judging by the title, The Lay of the Land sounds like it’s about the sort of half-annoying clichéd phrases—phrases like ‘get the gist’—that one’s dad uses with gusto. And, basically, it is—find me a more sweetly awkward father than Frank Bascombe, the sort of man who earnestly uses “greenbacks” for “dollars,” and who always gives 110 percent.
In other words, The Lay of the Land seemed less important from the start. But it’s not, really. It may have fewer sweeping celebrations of the American scene, but it’s set in a time—the Florida recount of 2000—when such assessments were rendered impossible by the profound uncertainty of the scene itself. It’s as much about America as its predecessor, but it’s about a tougher, more ambivalent America, and as such it is a book that spends less time patting itself on the back and more time exploring the small scenes and quiet contradictions that make life in that country so complicated yet rewarding. It makes a softer case for its own importance, but it’s just as deserving of your time.
Bonus: Watch the unassailable David Strathairn read the opening pages of The Lay of the Land.
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