Ferdinand Mount
This year I have been mostly reading novels about American estate agents. You might not think this would be a popular subject, but in the kingdom of the restless the realtor is royalty. Anyway novels about moving can be moving novels. And informative too. After finishing Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury, £7.99), I feel I could close a deal on a three-bed dutch-colonial condo without breaking sweat. This is the third of Ford's rich, rambling novels about Frank Bascombe, the one-time sportswriter who now sells houses and sheds wives along the Jersey shore in a mordant, solitary, reflective sort of way. It's getting late. Independence Day, the title of the previous volume, has given way to Thanksgiving — for what Frank stoically doesn't quite ask.
In Jane Smiley's Good Faith (Faber, £7.99), Joey Stratford sells houses in an inland rustbelt state. He's pretty solitary too, though he gets more sex. Smiley is snappier and plottier than Ford. She goes a little easier on the desolation too and, as she always does, gives you a delicious sense of being in there. But my favourite, for its sly charity and flickery wit, is Anne Tyler's Digging to America (Vintage, £7.99). If Jane Austen had ever written a novel about an Iranian-born estate agent in Baltimore who adopts a Korean orphan, this would be it. What is so remarkable about these three enchanting books is that in each of them the estate agent adores being an estate agent. Nothing like this has happened in world literature before.
Previous page
