Zoning Out and In

Christopher Tayler

• The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
  Bloomsbury, 485 pp, £17.99, October 2006, ISBN 0 7475 8188 6

It takes me so long to read the ’paper,
said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker,
because I have to identify myself with everyone in it,
including the corpses, pal.

John Berryman, Dream Song

When we first meet him in The Sportswriter (1986), Frank Bascombe is 38 and trying to fend off the ‘dreaminess’ that has afflicted him since Ralph, his first son, died of Reye’s syndrome four years earlier. Now divorced from ‘X’, Ralph’s mother, Frank spends the Easter weekend of 1983 researching a human interest story for the upmarket sports magazine he works for, listening to unsolicited confessions from a fellow member of his informal Divorced Men’s Club, and trying to get his relationship with Vicki Arcenault, his new girlfriend, onto a more solid footing. None of this works out particularly well. His ‘inspirational’ interviewee, a disabled former athlete, is bitterly depressed and ‘as dreamy as a barn owl’. Walter from the Divorced Men’s Club turns up at Frank’s house, becomes agitated while detailing a one-night stand with a man, grabs him, tries to kiss him, then goes home and shoots himself. Frank learns about Walter’s suicide during an Easter meal with the Arcenaults, and his decision to leave in order to identify the body enrages Vicki. She rejects his impromptu offer of marriage. When he tries to embrace her, ‘she busts me full in the mouth with a mean little itchy fist that catches me midstride and sends me to the turf.’