Out of Character

Atlantic, The, December, 2006 by Joseph O'Neill

No tricks,” Raymond Carver crisply enjoined the prospective writer. “At the first sign of a trick or gimmick in a piece of fiction … I tend to look for cover.” Carver was, as everybody knows, a mentor, friend, and admirer of Richard Ford; yet one can’t help wondering whether Ford’s verbally awesome but, I fear, fundamentally specious new novel would have had the maestro ducking behind a parapet.

The Lay of the Land is the third Frank Bascombe narration—Frank being the dreamy, sadly self-monitoring sportswriter of The Sportswriter,, and thereafter the less dreamy but still sadly self-monitoring real-estate broker of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Independence Day, a man at such a quidditative loss as to prompt his ex-wife to remark, “Everything’s in quotes with you, Frank....

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