The Lay of the Land

The other day I began reading Richard Ford's new novel, The Lay of the Land. I have not read either of the two previous novels in the sequence, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, but it didn't take me long to get a sense of why Ford is admired as a stylist. His main character, Frank Bascombe, in this book is a 55-year-old real estate agent. He's under treatment for prostrate cancer. It's closing in on the end of the year 1999. Frank's age, his medical history, the breakup of his most recent marriage, the closing of the millenium, and the dark events reported in the daily papers provide the background for the first-person narrative of his observations and reflections as he goes about the business of his life. What jumps off the page at me, at the start of this book, is Bascombe's (Ford's) eye for the physical details of the suburban landscape. In this passage, he is driving in a car with his business partner on the way to business meeting:

Route 37, the Toms River Miracle Mile, is already jammed at 9:30 with shopper vehicles moving into and out of every conceivable second-tier factory outlet lot, franchise and big-box store, until we're mostly stalled in intersection tie-ups under screaming signage and horn cacophony. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when merchants hope to inch into the black, is traditionally the retail year's hallowed day, with squadrons of housewives in housecoats and grannies on walkers, shouldering past security personnel at Macy's and Bradlees to get their hands on discounted electric carving knives and water-filled orthopedic pillows for that special arthritic with the chronically sore C6 and C7. Only this year—due to the mists of economic unease—merchants and their allies, the customers, have designated "gigantic" Black Tuesday and Black Wednesday Sales Days and are flying the banner of EVERYTHING MUST GO!—in case, I guess, the whole country's gone by Friday.

Cars are everywhere, heading in every direction. A giant yellow-and-red MasterCard dirigible floats above the buzzing landscape like a deity. Movie complexes are already opened with queues forming for Gladiator and The Little Vampire. Crowds press into Target and International Furniture Liquidator ("If we don't have it you don't want it"). Christmas music's blaring, though it's not clear from where, and the traffic's barely inching. Firemen in asbestos suits and Pilgrim hats are out collecting money in buckets at the mall entrances and stoplights. Ragged groups of people who don't look like Americans skitter across the wide avenue in groups, as though escaping something, while solitary men in gleaming pickups sit smoking, watching, waiting to have their vehicles detailed at the Pow-R-Brush. At the big Hooper Avenue intersection, a TV crew has set up a command post, with a hard-body, shiny-legged Latina, her stiff little butt turned to the gridlock, shouting out to the 6:00 p.m. viewers up the seaboard what all the fuss is about down here.

Yet frankly it all thrills me and sets my stomach tingling. Unbridled commerce isn't generally pretty, but it's always forward-thinking. And since nowadays with my life out of sync and most things in the culture not affecting me much—politics, news, sports, everything but the weather—it feels good that at least commerce keeps me interested like a scientist. Commerce, after all, is basic to my belief system, even though it's true, as modern merchandising theory teaches, that when we shop, we no longer really shop for anything. If you're really looking for that liquid stain remover you once saw in your uncle Beckmer's basement that could take the spots off a hyena, or you're seeking a turned brass drawer pull you only need one of to finish refurbishing the armoire you inherited from Aunt Grony, you'll never find either one. No one who works anyplace knows anything, and everyone's happy to lie to you. "They don't make those anymore." "Those've been back-ordered two years." "That ballpoint company went out of business, moved to Myanmar and now makes sump pumps ... All we have are these." You have to take what they've got even if you don't want it or never heard of it. It's hard to call this brand of zero-sum merchandising true commerce. But in its apparent aimlessness, it's not so different from the real estate business, where often at the end of the day, someone goes away happy.

We've now made it as far as the Toms River western outskirts. Motels are all full here. Used-car lots are Givin' 'em Away. A bonsai nursery has already moved its tortured little shrubs to the back, and employees are stacking in Christmas trees and wreaths. Flapping flags in many parking lots stand at half-staff—for what reason, I don't know. Other signs shout Y2K MEMORABILIA SCULPTURE! INVEST IN REAL ESTATE NOT STOCKS! TIGHT BUTTS MAKE ME NUTS! WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS. Yellow traffic cones and a giant blinking yellow arrow are making us merge right into one lane, alongside a deep gash in the freshly opened asphalt, beside which large hard-hatted white men stand staring at other men already down in the hole—putting our tax dollars to work.

There's much to admire here: the sheer energy of the rhetoric of enumeration; the way the (entirely man-made) landscape alongside becomes the objective correlative for the consumer culture which has spawned it; the accumulating rhythmic patterns shaking out a kind of wryly humorous verbal jazz—I especially like the last sentence for that. This is writing that gives me physical pleasure, I was smiling to myself—and often laughing out loud—as I read it.

And as I read I found myself thinking about two other books in which topography plays a more than passing role in the way the story emerges. Here's Henry Perowne piloting his car through the streets of a London neighborhood in Saturday:

He's heading a couple of blocks south in order to loop eastwards across the Tottenham Court Road. Cleveland Street used to be known for garment sweatshops and prostitutes. Now it has Greek, Turkish and Italian restaurants—the local sort that never get mentioned in the guides—with terraces where people eat out in summer. There's a man who repairs old computers, a fabric shop, a cobbler's, and further down, a wig emporium, much visited by transvestites. This is the fair embodiment of an inner city byway—diverse, self-confident, obscure. And it's at this point he remembers the source of his vague sense of shame or embarrassment: his readiness to be persuaded that the world has changed beyond recall, that harmless streets like this and the tolerant life they embody can be destroyed by the new enemy—well-organised, tentacular, full of hatred and focused zeal. How foolishly apocalyptic those apprehensions seem by daylight, when the self-evident fact of the streets and the people on them is their own justification, their own insurance. The world has not fundamentally changed. Talk of a hundred-year crisis is indulgence. There are always crises, and Islamic terrorism will settle into place, alongside recent wars, climate change, the politics of international trade, land and fresh water shortages, hunger, poverty and the rest.

He listens to the Schubert sweetly fade and swell. The street is fine, and the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who've ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It won't easily allow itself to be destroyed. It's too good to let go. Life in it has steadily improved over the centuries for most people, despite the junkies and beggars now. The air is better, and salmon are leaping in the Thames,

He's heading a couple of blocks south in order to loop eastwards across the Tottenham Court Road. Cleveland Street used to be known for garment sweatshops and prostitutes. Now it has Greek, Turkish and Italian restaurants—the local sort that never get mentioned in the guides—with terraces where people eat out in summer. There's a man who repairs old computers, a fabric shop, a cobbler's, and further down, a wig emporium, much visited by transvestites. This is the fair embodiment of an inner city byway—diverse, self-confident, obscure. And it's at this point he remembers the source of his vague sense of shame or embarrassment: his readiness to be persuaded that the world has changed beyond recall, that harmless streets like this and the tolerant life they embody can be destroyed by the new enemy-well-organised, tentacular, full of hatred and focused zeal. How foolishly apocalyptic those apprehensions seem by daylight, when the self-evident fact of the streets and the people on them is their own justification, their own insurance. The world has not fundamentally changed. Talk of a hundred-year crisis is indulgence. There are always crises, and Islamic terrorism will settle into place, alongside recent wars, climate change, the politics of international trade, land and fresh water shortages, hunger, poverty and the rest.

He listens to the Schubert sweetly fade and swell. The street is fine, and the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who've ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It won't easily allow itself to be destroyed. It's too good to let go. Life in it has steadily improved over the centuries for most people, despite the junkies and beggars now. The air is better, and salmon are leaping in the Thames, and otters are returning. At every level, material, medical, intellectual, sensual, for most people it has improved. The teachers who educated Daisy at university thought the idea of progress old-fashioned and ridiculous. In indignation, Perowne grips the wheel tighter in his right hand. He remembers some lines by Medawar, a man he admires: "To deride the hopes of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind." Yes, he's a fool to be taken in by that hundred-year claim. In Daisy's final term he went to an open day at her college. The young lecturers there like to dramatise modern life as a sequence of calamities. It's their style, their way of being clever. It wouldn't be cool or professional to count the eradication of smallpox as part of the modern condition. Or the recent spread of democracies. In the evening one of them gave a lecture on the prospects for our consumerist and technological civilisation: not good. But if the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods, certainly in this city, lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended lifespans, wondrous machines. This is an age of wondrous machines. Portable telephones barely bigger than your ear. Vast music libraries held in an object the size of a child's hand. Cameras that can beam their snapshots around the world. Effortlessly, he ordered up the contraption he's riding in now through a device on his desk via the Internet. The computer-guided stereotactic array he used yesterday has transformed the way he does biopsies. Digitalised entertainment binds that Chinese couple walking hand in hand, listening through a Y-socket to their personal stereo. And she's almost skipping, that stringy girl in a shell suit behind a three-wheel all-terrain pushchair. In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.

In a spirit of aggressive celebration of the times, Perowne swings the Mercedes east into Maple Street. His well-being appears to need spectral entities to oppose it, figures of his own invention whom he can defeat. He's sometimes like this before a game. He doesn't particularly like himself in this frame, but the second-by-second wash of his thoughts is only partially his to control-the drift, the white noise of solitary thought is driven by his emotional state. Perhaps he isn't really happy at all, he's psyching himself up. He's passing by the building at the foot of the Post Office Tower—less ugly these days with its aluminium entrance, blue cladding and geometric masses of windows and ventilation grilles looking like a Mondrian. But further along, where Fitzroy becomes Charlotte Street, the neighbourhood is packed with penny-pinching office blocks and student accommodation—ill-fitting windows, low ambition, not lasting well. In the rain, and in the right temper, you can imagine yourself back in Communist Warsaw.

Here—and throughout all of Saturday—we are given simultaneous access to the cityscape itself and to the interior landscape of Henry Perowne's hyperactive imagination: the things he passes as he drives are triggers for memories, for questioning, for self-analysis, for the whole simultaneous wash of one thought leading to another thought, lost in thought even as he continues to drive toward further stimulation of which he is at this moment completely unaware. I like the way McEwan slides us along in the fourth paragraph from the Schubert to the thoughts about life that Perowne has bouncing around in his head to the Medwar quotation that occurs to him to further thoughts about our place in the history of civilization to the wonders of technology to the Chinese couple and the stringy girl in the suit. This is writing of considerable richness and persuasiveness.

And, finally, here is topology of yet a different sort, the opening paragraphs of Chang-rae Lee's Aloft, in which his narrator Jerry Battle, also a man of middle age, is piloting his plane over Long Island:

From up here, a half mile above the Earth, everything looks perfect to me.

I am in my nifty little Skyhawk, banking her back into the sun, having nearly completed my usual fair-weather loop. Below is the eastern end of Long Island, and I’m flying just now over that part of the land where the two gnarly forks shoot out into the Atlantic. The town directly ahead, which is nothing special when you’re on foot, looks pretty magnificent now, the late-summer sun casting upon the macadam of the streets a soft, ebonized sheen, its orangey light reflecting back at me, matching my direction and speed in the windows and bumpers of the parked cars and swimming pools of the simple, square houses set snugly in rows. There is a mysterious, runelike cipher to the newer, larger homes wagoning in their cul-de-sac hoops, and then, too, in the flat roofs of the shopping mall buildings, with their shiny metal circuitry of HVAC housings and tubes.

From up here, all the trees seem ideally formed and arranged, as if fretted over by a persnickety florist god, even the ones (no doubt volunteers) clumped along the fencing of the big scrap metal lot, their spindly, leggy uprush not just a pleasing garnish to the variegated piles of old hubcaps and washing machines, but then, for a stock guy like me, mere heartbeats shy of sixty (hard to even say that), the life signs of a positively priapic yearning. Just to the south, on the baseball diamond—our people’s pattern supreme—the local Little League game is entering the late innings, the baby-blue-shirted players positioned straightaway and shallow, in the bleachers their parents only appearing to sit churchquiet and still, the sole perceivable movement a bounding goldenhaired dog tracking down a Frisbee in deep, deep centerfield.

I'm interested here in the shift of perspective upward, how viewing the landscape from above engenders an entirely different, lyrical mode of observation and reflection on the part of our narrator. The opening passage of the novel establishes the view from above as a kind of idealized version of the human landscape that looks—and is—much messier when you're inside of it than when you're above it all.

All three of these passages draw me in, satisfy my readerly need for grounding and for direction. I feel in each instance like I am in the hands of an author who knows exactly what he is doing, who is having a good time doing it, and who is offering me the chance to step into this landscape with him and explore the lay of the land.