This novel is about what it’s like to be staring down the last third of your life when you’re an upper-middle class, white, male American living on the east coast. You might be thinking that’s a crowded piece of real estate, what with Philip Roth’s Everyman and other works. Ford defends the property well and has a lot to say. My one complaint with the book is that he takes more room than he needs to say it. It’s a thick book, and some parts move pretty slowly.

The book takes place over a busy Thanksgiving holiday in 2000. The millenium and the undecided presidential election complements the precarious tone of Bascomb’s life. In the months preceding the novel’s setting, his otherwise happy and loving wife has left him for a long-lost and presumed dead former husband, he’s been diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer, his one realty associate has been mulling plans to Bascomb’s agency, he’s locked in a cold war with his neighbors and he’s had worrisome relations with his first wife and his adult son and daughter. Add to this his unresolved grief over the death, years ago, of his oldest son.

Ford is a master of creating all of these underground rivers in a character who relishes tranquility. Over the course of the book, these rivers collide and spring up to flood the lay of the land and wash away his emotional bulkheads. Frank tries to keep it on cruise control, but Ford torments the guy like a greek god and forces him to break down and see his own—our own—desperation.