Sunday,
June 11
After 200 pages
I’m starting to relax into Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land. I’m gradually lowering my guard. I have a ton of respect for Ford. I’ve read all his books. He was the first author whose hardcover first
editions I bought—at list price—wanting him to have the just proceeds of his
work. But I’m not willing yet to trust
his judgment on the death of your child.
There are
similarities between Frank’s life, Ford’s narrator, and my own. Frank has lost a child. Frank has had a marriage dissolve. Frank has a daughter. Frank lives in New Jersey .
Frank rejects the “ethical-cultural-response
that catastrophe’s ‘a good thing for everybody,’ because “it dramatizes life’s
great mystery and reveals how much all is artifice-connected response to things
is just made-up stuff anyway.[1]”
I couldn’t agree
with Frank more.
The catastrophe
in this case is that Frank’s second wife Sally has just come home from a
weekend at her former in-laws, where she faced the surprising reappearance of
her ex-husband, lost and presumed dead for thirty five years. When Sally sat Frank down on the couch and
gave him this news, Frank was as surprised as Sally that her long-lost first
husband had appeared in her in-laws foyer.
“Sometimes simple words,” Franks reflects, like surprised, “are the best.”
In Sally’s behalf, Frank narrates, she was dazed.
She’d gone to Illinois
I was willing to trust Ford enough to see what happened next.
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