The Lay of the Land Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, and our BookBrowse Review of The Lay of the Land.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are meant to enliven your group's discussion of Richard Ford's abundant, funny, sorrowful, and miraculously observed new novel, The Lay of the Land.


About This Book
In The Lay of the Land, the author reintroduces readers to Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his earlier novels The Sportswriter and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Independence Day. He is a man of mild aspect and strong, sometimes violent feelings, capable of kindnesses both diligent and spontaneous but also of flashes of cruelty and contempt. A native Southerner transplanted to Michigan, the New Jersey suburbs, and lately the beach town of Sea-Clift ("NEW JERSEY'S BEST-KEPT SECRET"); a one-time novelist turned sportswriter and then realtor; a survivor of a divorce, the father of a dead son: Frank is living testimony to the infinite renewability of American life (just as his career speaks of the infinite renewability of American real estate). But Frank doesn't want any more renewal. At 55, he's entered the Permanent Period, the "end to perpetual becoming, to thinking that life schemed wonderful changes for me, even if it didn't. It portended a blunt break with the past and provided a license to think of the past only indistinctly (who wouldn't pay plenty for that?)" [p. 54].

But as he prepares for the Thanksgiving weekend of the year 2000 and braces himself for the aftershocks of an inconclusive presidential election, Frank worries that his Permanent Period may be coming to an end. His wife Sally has left him for her first husband, who was supposed to be dead; his first wife, Ann, has decided that she's in love with him, again or still; his prostate has sprouted cancer, which is being treated with radioactive BBs, and even his daughter Clarissa, who faithfully shepherded him through his procedure and recovery, is switching sexual preference. Add the ill-considered business plans of his Tibetan business partner, the imminent arrival of his eccentric surviving son, and a bomb going off at the hospital where he likes to eat lunch, and you can understand why Frank would rather skip Thanksgiving, why he might rather skip everything.

The fact that he doesn't—that he shows up for every painful and absurd event of this dizzyingly eventful novel and reports them all in a voice as confiding, expansive, and laugh-out-loud funny as any in American fiction—is something to be grateful for. Happy Thanksgiving.


Reader's Guide

1. What do you make of the story that opens the novel: that of the community college teacher who, before being gunned down by one of her disgruntled students, was asked if she was ready to meet her maker and replied "Yes. Yes, I think I am" [p. 3]. Why is Frank so riveted by this question? How does he think he might answer in similar circumstances? What does he mean when he says that "It's not a question . . . that suburban life regularly poses to us. Suburban life, in fact, pretty much does the opposite" [p. 4]? Is he right? How do the themes of death, self-accounting, and the terrifying randomness of the American berserker recur throughout The Lay of the Land?
2. What does Bascombe mean by the "Permanent Period?" When does he seem to have entered it, and what events threaten to evict him from it? How serious is he when he speaks of its pleasures? In the scheme of this novel, is permanence the same thing as happiness? As resignation?
3. The Lay of the Land is set during Thanksgiving, as The Sportswriter takes place at Easter and Independence Day over a July 4th weekend. How does the holiday figure in the novel? How does Frank feel about it, and how do the other characters appear to be celebrating it? Discuss the novel's exploration of themes like gratitude, family, and abundance—as well as the ambiguous meaning of "pilgrim."

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.