Harrowing! Hilarious! Surprising! Profound! (NYT Review) Frank Bascombe, aspiring novelist turned sportswriter turned real estate agent, is Richard Ford’s Everyman, and his trilogy of Bascombe novels, a literary endeavor frequently compared to John Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels, gives us a small but wide-open window on middle-class, suburban life as it’s evolved in America over several tumultuous decades. Frank is not only a literary cousin to Rabbit, but he’s also a spiritual descendant of Binx Bolling, the self-conscious hero of Walker Percy’s “Moviegoer,” and of Richard Yates’s alienated, Hopperesque loners. Sunk deep in the effluvia of day-to-day routines, he broods over the big, existential questions of the human condition, seeking “to maintain a supportable existence that resembles actual life” while trying to manage his expectations and his dreams. In “The Lay of the Land,” the lethargic third installment of Frank’s story (it follows “The Sportswriter,” published in 1986, and the 1995 sequel “Independence Day”), Mr. Ford gives us three days in his hero’s life in New Jersey. It is Thanksgiving week in the year 2000, as the contested presidential election drags on, and the boom years of the 90’s are beginning to turn a corner. Frank has been treated for prostate cancer, his second wife has unexpectedly left him for her first husband, and at the age of 55, he spends a lot of time thinking about all the things he has never done — from hiking the Appalachian Trail to learning German to sleeping with a movie star. He spends even more time thinking up strategies for coping — ways to accommodate and negotiate the world without inflicting further damage on his already fragile sense of self.