If only Clare would just take the plunge (always the realtor's warmest wish for mankind), banish fear, think that instead of having suffered error and loss, he's survived them (but won't survive them indefinitely), that today could be the first day of his new life, then he'd be fine. In other words, accept the Permanent Period as your personal savior and act not as though you're going to die tomorrow but--much scarier--as though you might live.

The Lay of the Land is the third novel in a trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and also includes Independence Day. The protagonist of all three novels is Frank Bascombe, a one-time short-story writer who also wrote about sports. He is now twice married. His most recent wife has left him to re-unite with her former husband. His two grown children have various minor life crises. His first wife is flirting with him. He has recently survived (for now) a diagnosis of prostate cancer. It's Thanksgiving weekend, and he is living in what he calls "the Permanent Period." What others might call the slow slide to death (Frank is only 52), but Frank sees as the time when no major changes are anticipated or sought and so life can seem like a state of stasis, though clearly not of calm. Oh, yeah. The novel also takes place during the period in 2000 when the Gore/Bush election remained unresolved. Big decisions seem to be on hold. Can this situation remain? Probably not. How does it end? I don't know (haven't finished the book yet!).

So why include it in this review? Because I might not get another chance. Go about your affairs as if you might live!

Those who have read The Sportswriter and Independence Day will likely remember some of the sharp facts of Frank's life. He had a third child, a boy, who died in childhood. This event dunked Frank into a pool of dreaminess and womanizing that ended his first marriage. It also disconnected him from his children, his past ambitions and nearly life in general. In the second book, Frank took a trip to Cooperstown with his other son, in an attempt at father-son bonding, which ended with the son getting a baseball in the head. Accidentally, of course, though also (intentionally) rich in significance. In the new novel, Frank continues his drifting ways, though one should also say that Frank is clearly his life's "decider." He only appears passive because he is so deeply reflective; he is not in denial about what he's done or hasn't.

The narrative of Ford's trilogy is ultimately less the point than the creation of Frank. What I mean is, it's not what happens next that matters. It's how Frank responds to the day-by-day. Who Frank is. How he gets to be that way. What his options are. And the persistence of meaning over time. If it does. The lay of the land, in other words. It's just what's out there and how you deal with it. How we go along for the ride. And Frank provides quite a ride. He's a character as resonant as Updike's Rabbit, as Richler's Kravitz. As Jay Gatz, too.

Pages 326-327, in fact, provide a number of discussion points on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby. Frank's car is in need of repair. At the local auto shop, the attendant is reading Fitzgerald's novel. Frank notes "garage mechanics, of course, played a pivotal role in Fitzgerald's denoument:

I'm tempted to poll his views about Jay Gatz. Victim? Ill-starred innocent? Gray-tinged antihero? Or all three at once, vividly registering Fitzgerald's glum assessment of our century's plight--now blessedly at an end. ... It's possible of course that as a modern student, Chris doesn't subscribe to the concept of author per se. I, however, still do.

When a significant American author (Ford) references a significant American novel (The Great Gatsby), readers are free to rush to all kids of conclusions. Gatsby is famously a novel about the failure of the American Dream, as many high school essayists have insisted. A similar theme could be staked for Ford's trilogy. We might also note that "the end of American exceptionalism" is one of the dominant stories of the presidency of George W. Bush, and Ford knew the outcomes of certain events (Iraq) while he presented the pessimistic Frank in the period that ultimately handed Dubya the keys to the White House. Things often don't work out the way we want them to, but we need to keep trying and live our lives looking forward, not back.

Mao II by Don DeLillo is a novel of a different feather. Ford took a jab at post-modernism with his joke about "the concept of author" (while also writing a novel about a writer-turned-realtor who talks about novels). DeLillo wrote a novel about a novelist who has concluded that the best novelists these days are terrorists. Terrorists implement stories that shock us to the depths of our souls; novelists write narratives that get written about in the back pages of newspapers and read by increasingly dwindling numbers of people. Terrorists tell us more about our world today than novelists do--or so says DeLillo's protagonist (circa 1991).

After 9/11, one isn't surprised by Mao II's conceit, though its prescience is remarkable. DeLillo's "novel of ideas" prepared us for a world to come--as novelists are supposed to do. Look forward, not backward. Ironically, one could say terrorists look backward, perpetuating grievances, instead of doing the hard imaginative work of reconciliation and synthesis. In making his point, thus, DeLillo also disproves it. The power of his novel is stronger than any bomb. (Future President's take note).

I end this review with a look at Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami, which I read in one sitting, on an airplane traveling east to west over the Atlantic last July. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Sputnik Sweetheart is essentially a three-character novel. Uncharacteristically slim for a Murakami novel, it is the first novel in which Murakami explores lesbianism in depth, though the principal themes are still familiar ones to the Japanese author's faithful following: the effects of prolonged loneliness and alienation, growing up emotionally stunted in a densely populated and overwhelmingly conformist society, and the conflict between following one's dreams and clamping down on them in order to assimilate into society.

The plot of Sputnik Sweetheart is simple yet strange. The protagonist, a young man, is in love with a young woman, but she doesn't return his feelings. She falls in love with an older woman, whom she work for. Her feelings are a surprise to her because she didn't believe she was gay. She keeps her love for the older woman a secret. They travel internationally together. In Greece, she confesses her feelings, then disappears. She is never found.

Murakami has been compared to Kafka for his persistent attraction to the absurd. He might also be compared to Woody Allen for his wise cracking. Sputnik Sweetheart is a somewhat slight novel, yet I found it deceptively simple. As the Wikipedia entry suggests: the novel contains Murakami's principal themes. The story is slight and peculiar and unresolved at the conclusion. A most contemporary situation! A tightly packed little riddle.

I began this review writing about books that "tell it like it is, while also suggesting mysteries remain to uncover." And ended with books about mysteries so strange one struggles to find any there there. In between was The Lay of the Land, which seemed to point in both directions at once: toward the real and into the void. Literature binds the opposite points of this binary together. Or tries to. This reader, at least, is grateful for the range of work available from which to choose. 

There are many ways to write well. And read.

Michael Bryson is the editor of The Danforth Review.