Even though one could say that as a philosopher reading forms a large part of my work, my interests pull me in so many different directions that I feel I am perpetually behind (sometimes embarrassingly so), publishers’ lists in any particular field or genre. That is true for philosophy and doubly so for literature (which is better than philosophy, since it nourishes the mind but also pleases in a way that very few philosophical authors and their too-careful-to-the-point of verbosity prose are able to achieve). So it came to pass that I sat in my garden in July 2023 reading Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, published in 2006.

The Lay of the Land is the third volume of a trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and continued with Independence Day. In one respect, the trilogy is classic Americana: an epic that traces the domestic dramas of Frank Bascombe, former sportswriter cum New Jersey real estate not-quite mogul, on his journey from early to middle middle age, through his struggles to love his kids, divorce, re-marriage and its sundry complications, and finally to some sort of inner peace.

In almost all respects Bascombe is everything I absolutely rejected when I was younger. I disdained the social conventions that Bascombe lives by, never wanted to have children, valued ideas and art more than money, dressed in tight black jeans and a leather jacket rather than pale pastel golf shirts. But the power of literature (and all art) is to draw us into worlds which are not our own. The greatness of literature is not found in how accurately it “represents” this or that reality but with how skillfully it constructs its own reality for readers– who are not the characters– to explore. And if we have the courage to explore a world which is not our own we might find– sometimes to our horror, but always to our edification– that we see ourselves, or some aspect of ourselves, where we least expected to find them.

I have never been a sports writer (but I do spend too much time watching hockey and baseball), have never been divorced and have no children, but I am a middle aged man. Of course, the universe sends us no mystical signs, but it is amusing sometimes to think that it does. The delay of 17 years between Ford’s publishing the novel and my beginning to read it allowed my age to catch up with the protagonist: we are both 55. Perhaps occult forces were at work guiding my eye to this volume on a springtime book-shopping trip to Ann Arbor. Maybe the universe wanted to warn me about something (but I hope not, because Bascombe has prostate cancer).

Even as I shuddered at the thought of being caught dead in chinos and loafers, (not to mention being terrified of being diagnosed with cancer) the book made me realize the obvious: I was very far from being the cool near-teenager living in a basement apartment in Toronto but a middle middle aged (I hope 55 is middle middle age) man, sitting in the back garden of my two story brick house in Windsor. I was not a real estate agent but a Philosophy professor, decidedly middle class, living a very different life than my working class origins, and also capable of basic existential mathematics: every day on the planet increases the probability of my receiving the sort of bad news that Bascombe receives. The book forced on me the reality of the commonalities that age and class impose which run deeper than our chosen values. These commonalities do not negate differences of life goals and priorities, but they force us to be honest about the whole of what we become. That honest reckoning is difficult, because the funnest thing in life is self-deception.

But in order to provoke nourishing self-reflection and understanding, novels must please the mind. What pleases is Ford’s absolute mastery of economy of expression. His sentences are exquisite: “This Clevinger, entered the quiet, reverent classroom of test takers, walked among the desks and toward the front to where Ms. McCurdy stood, arms folded, musing out the window, possibly smiling. And he said to her, raising a Glock 9-mm to within six inches of the space just above the mid-point between her eyes, he said, “Are you ready to meet your Maker?” To which Ms. McCurdy, who was 46 and a better than average teacher and canasta player, and who had been a flight nurse in Desert Storm, replied, blinking her periwinkle eyes in curiosity only twice, “Yes. Yes, I think I am.” A scene of absolute horror is rendered with such quiet attention to the banal details that it renders the extraordinary ordinary in a way which better drives home the deeper point (which the rest of the novel explores) that each of us should cultivate the quiet dignity of Ms. McCurdy as we come closer to that inevitable meeting.

As I began the novel, storm clouds gathered quickly as they do here this time of year. The wind picked up and I became conscious of sitting under the limbs of a large mulberry tree. Directly overhead, jets headed out on a easterly flight path from Detroit Metro towards Europe. I thought: “If a branch fell or a 777 on its way to London dropped a piece of its wing on me, could I, in the fraction of a second before the tree or flap crushed me, answer the question with the same equanimity as Ms. McCurdy?” Probably not, because I do not believe in the God that gave her strength. Philosophy is not therapy. One can, with Socrates, extol the examined life and believe that philosophy is preparation for death (because it helps us live well and fully) and still spend most of one’s days trying to distract oneself from that relentless existential mathematics that I noted above. Every moment that you live is a subtraction from a finite sum of days.

I do not know how a younger man or a middle aged woman would experience The Lay of the Land. To be sure, the novel could still resonate for those at a different stage of life or experiencing it from a female perspective, but I am not certain they would feel the novel’s pull the same way a person in my position feels it. I am not saying that Ford had only middle aged men in mind when he wrote the book, but for me, its power lay in how perfectly it captures the way in which, no matter what one does at 55 (or thereabouts) one cannot deny that one is no longer young. Having adult children (like Bascombe) would put a fine point on that fact, but even without them one just feels (and looks) one’s age. And that is disconcerting, initially, whatever one’s walk of life, because it shatters the temporal illusion in which people live. Second to second, one does not look different, feel different, or worry about the next second being one’s last. But ruthlessly iterated over decades, we do change, our hair recedes, our knees ache, we would rather have a martini in our back garden and read Richard Ford than go to a club. Most importantly, we start to recognize emotionally, and not just abstractly, intellectually, that one second will be our last, and we are much closer to our final breath than to the first.

There is thus a deep intelligence at work beneath the surface narrative of the novel. Most people are not philosophers and do not ruminate on the meaning of life or grapple with their mortality by reading existential philosophy. Many seek spiritual comfort in religious communities, but many, like Bascombe, approach these essential problems through their memories. As we age, the number of days remaining to us shrinks, but we accumulate memories, and these become the substance of on-going self-examination: was I a good father or husband or partner, was I there when my friends needed me, did I make the right career choice, study the right subject, vote for the right candidate, speak up when the situation demanded. These are totally banal questions, and yet absolutely central to the only evaluation of one’s life that ultimately matters: one’s own. The difference between the philosophical and literary treatment of these issues is that in the latter case we experience them through the constructed feelings and thoughts of the characters: they are evoked, rather than laid out in the abstract. As soon as literature lectures it dies as art: if you want to lecture, become a professor; if you want to be an artist, trust that your audience will find their own way through your work.

There are no lectures in Lay of The Land. There are, unfortunately, some badly drawn scenes (Bascombe’s thoughts as he fantasizes about his daughter’s lesbian partner) and a melodramatic climax whose motivation I could not understand at all. The novel recovers from the fireworks of the climax and reaches a satisfying conclusion consonant with the tenor and the themes that Ford so wonderfully unfolds in this novel and its two preceding volumes. I do not know if Ford plans a fourth volume that would take us through to the end of Bascombe’s days but, for myself, I hope not. Sometimes literature, like life, is best when it leaves some things hanging in the balance.