Tom Watson

Built Ford Tough

A fortnight after I finished it, Richard Ford's trilogy-ending novel The Lay of the Land is still with me. And yet, I cannot tell you what happens in the book, what plot developments drive the last chapter in the saga of Frank Bascombe, what the story really is. There are some bits about a funeral, cancer treatment, real estate sales, and broken marriages. A lot of driving around New Jersey. And there's a violent ending that doesn't fit at all. But like a good cover of an old blues song, the latest Ford does not get by on what happens in its 800-plus pages, but how it makes you feel.

Here's how: thoughtful. Even more mortal. A little sad. But ultimately less cynical. A strange combination, and that's the book's brilliance.

It's been a long road for the failed sportswriter turned real estate agent, Frank Bascombe, a native of the south who finds himself in suburban New Jersey with two failed marriages, two wayward children and the memories of a third who died in childhood. He's old, has prostate cancer, and is aware that the country is going to hell. The time of the book is the Thanksgiving weekend of 2000 as the Florida recount saga drags on and Bush gets closer to his illegitimate Presidency. Bascombe leaves beach-front in a fictional Jersey shore town north of Barnegat Light and south of Asbury. He sells house and owns his own small agency.

And he faces the existential crisis of late middle age, which, in typical fashion, Ford dubs the Permanent Period. Age-wise, I'm always a period behind - I'm still in the Existence years. But the Permanent Period looms. For most of the book, Ford's inner voice tries to claim that it's not that bad, really. A lack of drive, the surrender of ambition, the acceptance of mortality are all good things - or so the protagonist thinks.

Then the crisis - first emotional, than physical (in a wacky Miami Vice sequence involving the Russian mob) and it's not all right. And Ford settles in the accept one thing and one thing only, to place it above all others: human love.

That will disappoint some of Ford's followers, who see him as the successor to the hopelessness of writers like Richard Yates, who is clearly a major influence. Yates found mainly hopelessness in modern American suburbia, an empty landscape. His followers may feel that leaving Frank Bascombe a happy man is like grafting a Disney ending onto Citizen Kane. But I think at the end of this major work - which included The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995) - Ford follows the other major influence, fellow southerner William Faulkner, who found light in august and hope against the odds.

Ford's Bascombe has never seemed to care, until he does. I'm not sure this is the novel Ford could have written at a younger age. But it's the one we have now. And with its 2000 mindset and foreshadowing of 9/11, it's most welcome indeed.

On the Road

A portion of my evening reading has been keeping me up deep into the night, placing me in the uncomfortable territory between sleep and thought, between the world of dreams and productive consciousness. It's not Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, a real reporter's book by Thomas Ricks, which painstakingly lays out the claim for utter incompetence in Iraq. Nor is it Plan of Attack, by the former reporter Bob Woodward, an insider who flips on his Administration sources and gets them to turn viciously on each other. Both books are chilling - horrific tales of a failed Presidency and an immoral foreign policy. But with those, I can take a sip, switch off the light, and slip into what Bob Dylan calls "a temporary death."

Not so with The Road.

Cormac McCarthy's brilliant portrait of humanity's winter is a short read, but a very, very long digestion. The story of a man and his son walking toward the sea after a cataclysm - nuclear? environmental? natural? we don't know and aren't told - is relentlessly bleak and pessimistic. Man has destroyed the planet; nothing grows. The only food surviving is years-old stores of goods as yet unfound by marauders and thin survivors - and other humans, hunted by gangs of killers.

A caution tale? I sensed none - just a tale, however horrible, however plausible. The ancient pull in the book is of a father's determination to see his child outlive him; to see another generation on its way, in whatever landscape it finds itself. Ash falls. But a few hearts still beat.

All this is in long introduction to a recent post by Glenn Greenwald entited American values. These too can be thrown away, leaving us on a wild and abandoned road. Maybe McCarthy is sending a warning after all - surely, contemporary literature reaches beyond the headlines to capture the truth. This is ours:

...by studying the torture methods used by America's enemies -- those uncivilized, evil regimes and groups we are always hearing about -- we learned how to torture people and then decided to copy their torture techniques. As always, the "rationale" of the Bush administration is that in order to defend our values and culture from the evil forces seeking to destroy us, we have to become as much like them as possible and copy their behavior....

... These extreme and vile techniques became standard operating procedure for how we interrogate detainees. Far worse, five years after September 11, the U.S. Congress -- right out in the open -- voted expressly to authorize the use of most if not all of these techniques and empower the President to use them at will. Put another way, our country, after five years of distance from 9/11 and after much debate and deliberation, decided to enshrine this behavior as legally authorized and reflective of our new national values.

Wallander's World

There's a distinct darkness on the edge of the old towns along the coast of southern Sweden in the dangerous world created by Henning Mankell and inhabited by his brilliant and reluctant police inspector Kurt Wallander.

I've ploughed through nearly all of the ten or so Wallander books in translation over the past three months, set in Skane just across the water from Copenhagen, an area of ancient villages, flat and barren landscape, farms and beaches. They're among the best detective books I've ever read, falling into the police procedural sub-genre; Mankel leads the reader matter-of-actly through the dogged, often mundane pursuit of criminals. But he has also created some of the most horrific killers ever to prowl a novelist's page, monsters who terrorize the farmsteads and quiet flats of Skane.

Mankel is a master of dramatic plot disclosure, spending most of his time traipsing along with Wallander, a puffy, late 40s divorcee who drinks too much, spends too much time alone, and worries incessantly about his grown daughter and aging father. Wallander's daily world is utterly mundane - lonely meals, long drives, flat tires, endless police bureaucracy. The detective is both the plodding, stubborn type but also possessing of a rare instinct; he's a man of cursory insight and strong powers of observation, even if the meaning of things takes a long while to unfold.

But now and again, Mankel moves from the familiar Wallander to the minds of his killers and the view is terrifying. These are damaged people, most have been abused or discarded. There is always a reason for their turn to violence, but Mankel is far from easily sympathetic. He explores the failure of their childhoods, or the political systems that spawned them, but he doesn't excuse the violence.

The Wallander series is a bit of a fin de siècle for old Sweden. The constant theme is a changing Swedish society, no longer quiet and stolid, but part of a wider and more violent world. Immigration is changing a homogeneous society. When violence strikes, Swedes immediately blame the outsiders. In truth, some of Mankel's killers are Swedish and some are foreigners; Mankel's comment seems to be about human congress in general, and he rejects a "Swedish way" while still publicly mourning the change.

Kurt Wallander has not been to television here in the United States yet, but his is a character that will certainly rival those on CSI or Law & Order. The series has been dramatized in Sweden in full, and by the BBC in part. The Wallander series is among the best-selling detective series in Europe, and it was recommended by my virtual buddy Pete Townshend. Indeed, there are Wallander-themed tours of the town of Ystad, where the series is based. Here in the U.S., Mankel hasn't cracked the top 1,000 on Amazon yet, but I think he may eventually. The plots are that good, the villains that nasty, and Kurt Wallander that good a character. Here's a small taste, from The Dogs of Riga, a typical understated bit of police station by-play.

Inspector Kurt Wallander sat in his office at the police station in Ystad and yawned. It was such a huge yawn that one of the muscles under his chin locked. The pain was excruciating. Wallander punched at the underside of his jaw with his right hand to free the muscle. Just as he was doing so, Martinsson, one of the younger officers, walked in. He paused in the doorway, puzzled. Wallander continued to massage his jaw until the pain subsided. Martinsson turned to leave.

"Come on in," Wallander said. "Haven't you ever yawned so wide that your jaw muscles locked?"

[snip]

Martinsson left, and Wallander stretched out in his chair. He could feel how tired he was. He'd been forced to answer emergency calls two nights in a row. The first night he'd led the hunt for a suspected rapist who'd barricaded himself in an empty summer cottage at Sandskogen. The man was drugged to the eyeballs and there was reason to think he could be armed, so they'd surrounded the place until 5 a.m., when he'd given himself up. The following night Wallander had been called out to a murder in the town centre. A birthday party had got out of hand, and the man whose birthday it was had been stabbed in the temple with a carving knife.

He got up from his chair and put on his fleece jacket. I've got to get some sleep, he thought. Somebody else can look after the snowstorm. When he left the station, the gusts of wind forced him to bend double. He unlocked his Peugeot and scrambled in. The snow that had settled on the windows gave him the feeling of being in a warm, cosy room. He started the engine, inserted a tape, and closed his eyes.