"The Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford, a reading journal (9)

"(Why do so many things happen in cars? Are they the only interior life left?)" (p. 297)

"We're nearing the 195 junction with the Garden State, where millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) are now streaming south toward Atlantic City - not a bad choice for Turkey Day. It's the stretch of highway we detoured around this morning due to police activity. I shoot through the interchange as new lighted town signage slips past: Belmar, South Belmar, pie-in-the-sky Spring Lake, all sprawling inland from the ocean into the pine scrub and lowlands west of the Parkway. HUNGRY FOR CAPITAL. REGULAR BAPTIST CHURCH - MEET TRIUMPH AND DISASTER HEAD-ON. HOCKEY ALL NIGHT LONG. NJ IS HOSPITAL COUNTRY. Any right-thinking suburbanite would like to feel confident about these things." (p. 279)

America has always been roadmovie land, road-literature, road-lives. Ford shortens the distance. His hero-main character Frank Bascombe drives around his Suburban, not the big distances of the open spaces, but the shorter ones of suburbia. The network of familiar roads, life takes place in a much smaller place than we would like to think, our biggest dramas all enclosed in few kilometers.

Driving around with Frank, we are made to feel the distance between the hypothetical "us" and others, what brings us close as humans and what divides us so much that communication is virtually impossible. That distance causes the rawl in the bar, and it makes for Frank's incompatibility with the "right-thinking" ones. America slit open in two.

I have been enjoying Frank's view "from the car", his look on his own world, one can see the car speeding through the American suburban landscape. And all from a car window, driving to be with yourself, the voyeur, seeing without being seen, observing life without living it, inside one's car, inside one's mind.

"Northbound Ocean Avenue is a wide, empty one-way separated from southbound Ocean Avenue by two city blocks of motels, surfer shops, bait shops, sea-glass jewelers, tatoo parlors, taffy stores (all closed for the season), plus a few genuine lighted-and-lived-in-houses. In summer, our beach towns up 35 swell to twenty times their winter habitation. But at nine at night on November 21st, the mostly empty strip makes for an eerie, foggy fifties-noir incognito I like. No holiday decorations are up. Few cars sit at curbs. The ocean, in frothy winter tumult, is glimpsable down the side streets and the air smells briny. Parking meters have been removed for the convenience of year-rounders. Two traditional tomato-pie stands are open but doing little biz. The Mexicatessen is going and has customers. Farther on, the yellow LIQUOR sign and the ruby glow of the Wiggle Room (a summer titty bar that becomes just a bar in the winter) are signaling they're open for customers. A lone Sea-Clift town cop in his black-and-white Plymouth waits in the shadows beside the fire department in case some wild-ass boogies from the East Orange show up to give us timid white people something to think about. A yellow. Town River Region school bus moves slowly ahead of us. We have now traveled as far east as the continent lasts. There's much to be said for reaching a genuine end mark in a world of indeterminacy and doubt. The feeling of arrival is hopeful, and I feel it even on a night when nothing much is going good."

So many American landscapes, literary and movie scenes in this Ocean Avenue. Hopper, Ellroy, Jack Lemmon, "I walk alone", crime and gansters, the NJ picture cards. All withered down, not losing any of its bitter taste, to the realtor non-hero, one of us.


Other reading journals: an index