A good rule of thumb for readers of contemporary fiction is to avoid anything written in the first person whose main character is a failed writer. Actually, I would avoid anything whose main character is any kind of writer, but failed or blocked writers purporting to write about themselves are the worst. Richard Ford enjoyed his biggest success as a novelist with The Sportswriter, in which Frank Bascombe, author of one book of short stories, retreats from art to sportswriting. In Independence Day, he has brought Frank back as a real-estate salesman. Now that's what I call blocked!

Both these novels belong to what might be called the Ruminative School of fiction. In novels by ruminants nothing much happens, but lots of Deep Thoughts get thought and often lots of fine writing gets written. Introducing a genuinely dramatic element would seem phony and inauthentic to writers of the Ruminative School. Such traditional forms of literary excitement as plot and character development are presumably beneath the dignity of those who have Deep Thoughts to think and fine writing to write. They write about what they know, and what they know is themselves.

Mind you, lots has happened before the novel begins. Without his memories of death and divorce, of pain and loss, of sex and writing gone bad, the Ruminative hero would be a cow without a cud. But nothing much is happening as we read, at least not to the hero, and the banal, everyday events of his life are little more than the medium or stock in which his meaty thoughts are suspended. To taste them, we must consume lots more filler than we really want to about, say, the real-estate market in New Jersey in the late 1980s.

Frank Bascombe's new occupation is meant to be the guarantee of his authenticity. Writers get paid for thinking Deep Thoughts, while real-estate salesmen, we may assume, must think them solely for love. Also, Frank's profession has been chosen as being particularly appropriate to what he calls "the Existence Period" of his life. Theorizing about the Existence Period comprises the deepest of his thoughts, though there is no thought of how pretentious it is to divide one's own life up into periods.

Frank is sincere even in his pretensions. He sees the Existence Period as that phase of his middle age during which his practice "has been to ignore much of what I don't like or that seems worrisome and embroiling," or as "the high-wire act of normalcy, the part that comes after the big struggle which led to the big blow-up" and is characterized by "the small dramas and minor adjustments of spending quality time simply with ourselves."

Frank may in fact hold some kind of record for spending quality time with himself. But he also has a son, Paul, to whom he feels he owes some of this precious commodity, and the drama of the novel, such as it is, consists of his taking this troubled teenage boy to visit as many sports halls of fame as they can in two days (i.e. two). That's about it. It is one of those ideas that exhausts itself in being stated. What is there to say about the actual visiting of these places that is more interesting than the idea of visiting them?

So the father-son expedition, which doesn't even begin until more than halfway through the novel, is cut short with its one quasidramatic event, which puts Paul in the hospital. There are, however, no lasting consequences to this moment of action—beyond making Frank think even deeper thoughts about himself and life and everything. These remind us that, as he tells a client who thinks he may have a gift for selling real estate himself, the realty business is "like being a writer. A man with nothing to do finds something to do."

It is this sense of surrounding vacancy, of busywork, of the commonplace unnecessarily rendered into self-conscious prose, that is the characteristic feature of the Ruminative style. Its tortured, introspective meanderings finally become exasperating and at times degenerate into a paragraph full of speculative questionings about what if this or that had happened, followed by some such colloquial formula as: "God only knows, right? Really knows?"

My favorite passage of Frank's speculative self-questioning, which almost rises to the height of self-parody, is where he spends a paragraph wondering what it would have been like if he and his ex-wife had bought a Volvo that they looked at years before and then didn't buy. Nothing from his more youthful past is beneath the notice of his Existence Period, it seems, though he fantasizes about reaching a Permanent Period in which he will have become more like an "ordinary person." My guess is that it is a delusion characteristic of the Existence Period to suppose that there is a Permanent Period. The bad news for readers is that it is Frank's interminable self-examination that has become permanent.