immediate death, Frank finds his attempts at serenity undermined by recent surgery for prostate cancer where “sixty radioactive iodine seeds” were implanted inside him. As in the first novel, Frank still seeks to find happiness, but the opening scene emphasizes how much his new sense of impending mortality colors his search.

For much of the first two hundred pages of the novel, there is not much narrative momentum as Frank has a series of appointments in Haddam, his former town. The reader learns that Frank now has a new partner in his real estate dealings, a Tibetan immigrant named Mike Mahoney who combines Buddhist leanings with a cutthroat will to succeed in business. After meeting to talk business with Mike, Frank visits a funeral parlor, tries to eat lunch at a hospital, chats with his dentist by the curbside, finds places to urinate, and visits with his former wife, Ann Dykstra, where she works at the De Tocqueville Academy. Things happen in an incidental, seemingly disconnected way. For instance, when Frank sees a hearse try to leave the funeral home, it gets held up by a Haddam Revolutionary War battle reenactment on the street. He gets into a fight in a bar because he cannot keep from making cracks at a fellow drunken customer. When he meets with Ann, she surprisingly brings up the possibility of the two of them being reunited. Still, aside from the graceful style, there is not much to involve the reader until Frank outlines how his second wife, Sally Caldwell, left him after her first husband Wally, long believed lost and missing in action in Vietnam, suddenly resurfaced in Scotland.

What the novel lacks in narrative momentum, however, is made up for with moments of humor and a growing thematic complexity. For instance, when visiting the funeral home just before the burial of his friend Ernie McAuliffe, Frank remembers how his friends tried to comfort Ernie during the terminal stages of his lymphoma by spending the day with him out on the Atlantic coastline. Eventually, they decide to lift up Ernie and immerse themselves and him in the cold surf while chanting, “We’re with you, my brother.” Ernie yells out obscenities as he pleads to get out of the freezing water. In its funny way, this male bonding scene resonates as one of many awkward moments when people try to respond to old age and illness in the novel. Frank would like to imagine that he has reached a plateau of contentment and success in life, something he calls the Permanent Period: “the time of life when very little you say comes in quotes, when few contrarian voices mutter doubts in your head, when the past seems more generic than specific, when life’s a destination more than a journey and when who you feel yourself to be is pretty much how people will remember you once you’ve croaked.” However, the more Frank discusses the Permanent Period, the more he finds himself undermined by circumstances. Trying to be reasonable, Frank invites his wife’s former husband, Wally, to their home, so she can get reacquainted with him; he never expected her to leave him as a result. As Frank finds himself unaccountably crying in a lesbian bar, or hunts around for a place to urinate in downtown nighttime Haddam without getting busted by the police, he has increasing trouble maintaining his dignity. This tension between the sense of security brought on by his philosophical musings and the disruptive, sometimes anarchic, events in the novel give it its peculiar tone.

Perhaps the quintessential scene of the novel involves Frank’s visit to a house on the beach with Clare Suddruth, a sixty-five-year-old Vietnam veteran who has recently abandoned his wife for a younger woman and then abruptly returns to her side once he learns that she has contracted multiple sclerosis. Clare would like to find a house for his wife’s last days, but once he sees the building, he quickly discovers that it has dangerous cracks in the foundation. Ford describes the scene carefully, including such minutiae as the shouts of teenagers in the distance and his thoughts about cell phone conversations. Gradually as the men get to know each other, their talk takes on metaphysical overtones. Clare mentions his dread of being destroyed by a bomb, saying, “We’ve got foundation problems.” Frank in turn reflects on how he cannot write agreements claiming, “Sale contingent on there being no disaster rendering all real estate worthless as tits on a rain barrel.” Just as soon as their client/realtor conversations hint at the fears of loss that underlie their lives, the scene shifts back to light easygoing banter, and Clare drives away happy not to buy the house.

As the reader grows used to Ford’s meandering narrative pace, the reader realizes that, just as one might expect from the title The Lay of the Land, Ford’s novel is extremely well grounded. Like a land surveyor, Ford has, like Updike before him, measured out a character’s life in all of its inconsequence and banality, but with moments of redemption and patterns that hint at something more. Whenever the novel leans toward the portentous, Ford quickly reaffirms the primacy of the individual moment in the everyday. Frank claims that he does not believe in epiphanies, preferring instead “a practical acceptance of what’s what, in real time and down-to-earth,” which he characterizes “as good as spiritual if you can finagle it.” Thus, even as a fox jumps out of one prospective home, ruining a potential sale, or as his daughter Clarissa gets thrown into jail for supposedly stealing her boyfriend’s car, or as Frank gets shot in the chest when he intercedes in an armed robbery taking place at his next door neighbor’s home, the novel still takes pleasure in its ability to encompass everything in Frank’s consciousness and even finds some Thanksgiving gratitude in the process. As Frank wonders, “Is that not the final wish of all of us on earth? To testify of our witness to wonders?”