The American author Richard Ford is scheduled to give a reading at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre on June 6. I’m currently immersed in his latest novel, The Lay of the Land, a real baggy monster whose narrative leisurely meanders, with plenty of oxbow digressions, through the fertile mind of Frank Bascombe, the realtor familiar to readers from the earlier installments of this post-hoc trilogy, The Sportswriter and Independence Day. I’ve reached page 340 (out of the hardback total of 485) and not that much has really happened. Much of the “action” actually unfolds in recollection, experienced in the cabin of Bascombe’s Chevy Suburban while he potters around suburban New Jersey on errands of questionable utility (then again, one of the recurring themes of this work seems to be the nagging sense that almost everything that occupies our time and attention is, in the end, not especially important).

But from such superficially thin material great books can be made. Ulysses, for example, managed to get some mileage from the humdrum observations of a commercial man and Ford’s book shares with Joyce’s book a fascination with how the educated mind draws on a myriad of referents, both high and (obscurely) low, as it struggles to process the senses’ inputs. (Ford also shares with Walker Percy a habit of gleefully comparing walk-on characters in his story with appropriately B-list figures from the Hollywood and TV firmament. For instance, a wannabe property developer is granted a “a Neville Brand stolidness” and during a bar-room scuffle Bascombe’s inept assailant lets out a “Gildersleevian ‘Oooomph’ when kneed in the groin.)

Above all, what makes Ford’s long novel worth sticking with is the laughter generated as Bascombe struggles to maintain his “Permanent Period” equanimity in the face of prostate cancer and a succession of people who could best be described as assholes. And Bascombe is very good at describing them. Here he is giving the lowdown on Thom van Ronk, the new boyfriend of Frank’s daughter, the formerly lesbian Clarissa:

“Tall, rangy, long-muscled, large-eyed, smooth-olive-skinned Amherst or Wesleyan grad–read Sanskrit, history of science and genocide studies, swam or rowed till books got in the way; born “abroad” of mixed parentage (Jewish-Navajo, French, Berber–whatever gives you charcoal gray eyes, silky black hair on the back of your hands and forearms); deep honeyed voice that seems made of expensive felt; intensely “serious” yet surprisingly funny, also touchingly awkward at the most unexpected moments (not during intercourse); plays a medieval stringed instrument, of which there are only ten in existence; has mastered Go, was once married to a Chilean woman and has a teenage child in Montreal he’s deeply committed to but rarely sees. Worked in Ghana for the Friends Service, taught in experimental schools (not Montessori), built his own ketch and sailed it to Brittany, wears one-of-a-kind Persian sandals, a copper anklet, black silk singlets suggesting a full-body tan, sage-colored desert shorts revealing a shark bite on his inner thigh from who-knows-what ocean, and always smells like a fine wood-working shop.”

I can sense Frank and Thom will not bond over the organic Thanksgiving turkey.