"The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford: a reader's journal (10)

Sea-Clift's Elmer Fudds

By the end of Part I, even the most absent of readers has realised that day one is over, day two is about to start. Not surrounded by the best omens: Clarissa is sleeping with an unknown man, Frank has been awake sleepless part of the night (one of the funniest blank nights I've ever read) and there's the Feensters, regular Elmer Fudds of Sea-Clift.

I sympathize with Bascombe's/Ford's political views so much and I find his writing so undettachedly funny, that it becomes very difficult sometimes to keep an unbiased distance. I just plain love it because I think the same, such a slanted way of reading a piece of fiction.

Being laughable stock, the Feensters are more of a sad issue. Frank, the real estate agent who prefers the "lay of the land", explains and excuses himself, property owner of land by the fragile ocean line: "We (...) all understand that we hold our ground on the continent's fragile margin at nature's sufferance. Indeed, the reason there are only five of us is that the previous fiteen "cottages" - grandiloquent old gabled and turreted Queen Annes, rococo Stick Styles, rounded Romanesque Revivals - were blown to shit and smithereens by Poseidon's wrath and are now gone wihtout a trace. Hurricane Gloria, as recently as 1985, finished the last one." (p.306-7)

Frank's ackowledging his transient presence, the Feensters - newly enriched exhibitionists - holding on to their property as if they will last forever, the saddest illusion of all. "In other wors, none of this, like none of us, is going to last here. We made our deal with the elements when we closed our deal with the bank. Except the Feensters didn't, and don't, see things that way."
And that is when they become regular Elmer Fudds, sticking keep-out-of-my-property signs all over, hating their neighbors, wanting to enclosed and forbid, possessive turned hysterical. Only they're not funny. And, a small revanche, Nick cheats on Drilla, we are told "in a whisper", witnesses standing side by side with Frank the character, as he overhears the incriminating phone talk.

The sinners and the takers, America's distasteful other half: "#5 Poincinet Road - a modern, white-painted, many-faceted, architect's dream/nightmare with metal banistered miradors, copeer roof, decks for every station of the sun, lofty, mirrored triple-panes open on the sea, imported blue Spanish tile flooring (heated), intercoms and TVs in the water closets, in-wall vacuums and sound system, solar panels, a burglar system that rings in Langley, built-in pecky cypress everthings". (p. 305) on the outside, and "This is in the cypress kitchen-cum-vu room - Mexican tile fireplace, facing Sonoran-style, silver-inlaid, hand-carved one-of-a-kind couches, Sub-Zero, commercial Vicking, built-in Cuisinart and a Swiss wine cellar at cabinet level." (p.315), the inside.

Elmer never had it better.

[#1 Kitchen cum area, área de refeições numa cozinha]
[#2 Uma das opções de lingua no Google é "Elmer Fudd"!
Outras: "bork, bork, bork!", "Klingon" e "Frisian"]


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