Impermanence-Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land

Readers of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land are privy to three days worth of the minute by minute thoughts of the books central character, ex-sports writer, NJ sea-shore realtor, Frank Bascombe. Given such access readers may expect a tidy, comprehensive portrait of a man. Yet, having finished this fabulous novel, I think its fair to say, they won't come away with such a picture. In fact, that's a bit of the point. Novels have tidy characters. Real people are vaster and more confusing than the folks we typically find in novels.

It's not that Ford fails to present a reality. Frank Bascombe's very real; I'm sure folks must ask Ford how Frank's doing. However, he lacks the definition we associate with the characters found in novels. Instead, like many of us, he's a character of contradictions, secrets, layers, and evasions. He's a little bit good, bad, and confused. He's kind, thoughtful and resolute one moment, coarse, cowardly and impulsive the next. To the extent you can fix him in this fun-house mirror of a novel, you're likely to see yourself. If you're brave. Or, if under fifty, maybe you'll mistake him for your dad. But, that would be a mistake.

Readers read to find characters. At the outset of this book, a detailed, stream of consciousness[ok, free indirect discourse], charting his Thanksgiving weekend circa 2000, Frank claims to be such a character. He presents himself as a with a self that is recognizable, without a clearly defined outline that is stable over time. This is not an accident, but rather the product of a decision he took in about 1992. At that time, he

realized....[very little]...except what I'd already done, said, eaten, etc.-seemed written in stone, and all of that meant almost nothing about what I might do. I had my history, okay, but not really much of a regular character, at least not an inner essence I or anyone could use as a predictor.. And something, I felt, needed to be done about that. I needed to go out and find myself a recognizable and persuasive semblance of a character.(53)

By Frank's estimate, he came to such a juncture by way of waiting, by hanging back from life. As he relates, "I'd felt since military school in Mississippi-as if life and its directives were never quite all they should be, and in fact, should have meant more"(52). According to him, faced with this sense, Frank launches himself into what he labels "the permanent period," or, a phase that might be seen as the psychological equivalent of Francis Fukuyama's much lampooned notion of the 'End of History.'

As Frank himself comments at one point, "...there are too many ways to say everything."(53) This is certainly true of the permanent period, which at various turns is presented as a phase, a choice, a virtue, a vice, a feeling, a belief and a philosophy. More a state of mind than a precisely worded creed, Frank nevertheless is attached to it with a religious devotion.

To enter into the Permanent Period is to be opposed to the idea that ones world is in the process of becoming. To be in the Permanent Period is to let the past rest, to forego thinking about or trying to right wrongs from the past. A person in the Permanent Period is focused on accepting himself; he is resigned to looking in the mirror and saying 'this is who I am.'

By his admission, Frank is launched into it by "a hunger for necessity, for something solid, the thing character stands in for"(54), by a sense of being finally brought "hard up against what felt like my self"(53), it is not necessarily a self-improvement program. Instead, frank maintains the Permanent Period is opposed to the everyday, detail-shot, worry-misery-gnawing mind-set"(159) and "dedicated to saving you from [it] by canceling unwanted self-consciousness, dimming fear-of-the-future in favor of the permanent, cutting edge of the present"(160).

In the distilled form, reduced to the nutshell I've just fitted it to, Frank's philosophy/lifestyle/religion reveals its...flaws. As he presents it in bits and pieces, with humor, and in response to events, it comes across as wise and feasible. However, as one can see in retrospect and upon reflection, his philosophy is an impossible one.

Frank's attempts to seal himself off in the present, safe from the past, the future, and the unmanageable disasters and responsibilities attendant upon them, proves fruitless. It's almost as if his attempt to do so invites an inordinate amount of chaos and disaster upon him. His past refuses to lie down: his wife leaves him for her ex-husband who they'd presumed dead; his ex-wife confesses that she's come to realize he's a kind man and tells him she wishes to remarry him; and memories and feelings surrounding the death of a son at age nine refuse to go ignored. The August previous he's discovered he has prostate cancer. His real-estate associate, Tibetan immigrant Mike Mahoney (Ford rather slyly contrasts but mostly compares Mike's Tibetan Buddhism with Frank's Permanent Period thinking)decides it's time for him to expand his professional horizons. His daughter breaks off a long-time relationship with a woman and returns home to get her bearings. He and his son seem to share an antipathy, but his son refuses to simply stay put, away, in Kansas City, where, to Frank's shame, the son employed writing smart-ass card copy for Hallmark and engaged to a one-armed Anita Ekberg look-alike. Frank assumes the relationship is intended to provoke him.

Thanksgiving weekend brings all these difficult situations to a head. Ultimately, under the stress of events, of a past that refuses to go away and a future that won't hold off, Frank cracks. Specifically, he comes to realize his entire Permanent Period outlook is an attempt to block out the death of his nine year-old son's some twenty years before. The passages when he finally faces this past, recalls the death, the grieving, contain terribly heart-wrenching writing. Frank recalls, "When our sweet, young son Ralph breathed his last troubled breath...Ann and I, in one of our last, free-wheeling marital strategizings-we were deranged-sought to plot an 'adventurous but appropriate' surrender of our witty, excitable, tenderhearted boy to time's embrace"(356).

Frank confesses to "years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it" and admits "these now seem not to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful non-acceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial turned to the fact that...my son, too, would never be again"(357). Yet, while Frank claims to be wiser, to have come to a self-knowledge, the reader is less likely to feel so sanguine, to trust that one can ever entirely, or always, accept death, loss and suffering. Frank is constantly trying to come to a point where he's touched his hurt in its entirety and it can hurt him no more, or no differently. Yet, he starts out so convicted only to discover he's fooled himself. And, one can't help fearing that he'll come to find he fools himself again. As any us would. As any of us do.