Richard Ford

Richard Ford is one of the truly great landscape artists of the American moment, and his trilogy of Frank Bascombe novels (The Lay of the Land is the third) feels like it’s been carved out of the hard time that marked the last decades of the twentieth century. Appearing as they have every ten years or so, these razor-sharp chronicles of a beleaguered suburban everyman have the eerie quality of time-lapse photography. Lay of the Land takes place at the close of the century and finds Bascombe blundering through his fifties, still halfheartedly selling real estate and surveying the bland mess he’s made of his life with a mixture of resignation and regret. Ford’s creation will forever be compared to John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, but Bascombe’s travails are much weirder, funnier, and—ultimately and intimately—more familiar.