I just finished but am sure to go back and re-read. Richard Ford (2006) The Lay of the Land. You wouldn’t think that one damned thing after another in the life of a 55-year old, divorced, New Jersey real estate broker with a Tibetan Buddhist immigrant who calls himself “Mike Maloney” as his partner, contemplating life in the wake of prostate cancer treatment and an impending Thanksgiving with the son from whom he has been estranged, who has run off to Kansas City and a job as a Hallmark card writer and a lesbian daughter, who has just broken up with her partner and has come home to take care of dad, while his second wife has run off with her ex-husband, who suddenly turned up after 30 years of being presumed dead…. could, in fact, be so compelling.

Picaresque, with melodramatic scenes comically undermined and made occasions for “what’s it all about” musings by the protagonist, I’ve never read anything like it. E.g., the third paragraph, describing a news item our hero is reading,

Don-Houston Clevinger, the disgruntled student– a Navy vet and father of two — had already done poorly on the midterm and was probably headed for a bad grade and a ticket home to McAllen. This Clevinger entered the quiet, reverent classroom of test takers, walked among the desks and toward the front where Ms. McCurdy stood, arms folded, musing out the window, possibly smiling. And he said to her, raising a Glock 9-mm to within six inches of the space just above the mid-point between her eyes, he said, ‘Are you ready to meet your Maker?’ To which Ms. McCurdy, who was forty-six and a better than average teacher and canasta player, and who’d been a flight nurse in Desert Storm replied, blinking her periwinkle eyes in curiosity only twice, ‘Yes. Yes, I think I am.’ Whereupon this Clevinger shot her, turned around slowly to address the astonished nurses-to-be and shot himself in approximately the same place.

Followed in the next paragraph by

I was witting down when I began to read this — in my glassed-in living room overlooking the grassy dune, the beach and the Atlantic’s somnolent shingle. I was actually feeling pretty good about things. It was seven o’clock on a Thursday morning the week before Thanksgiving. I had a ‘happy client’ closing at ten at the realty office here in Sea-Clift, after which the seller and I were going for a celebratory lunch at Bump’s Eat-It-Raw. My recent health concerns –sixty radioactive iodine seeds encased in titanium BBs and smart-bombed into my prostate at the Mayo Clinic–all seemed to be going well (systems up and running, locked and loaded). My Thanksgiving plans for a semi-family at-home occasion hadn’t yet started to make me fitful (stress is bad for the iodine seeds’ half-life). And I hadn’t heard from my wife in six months, which, under the circumstances f her new life and my old one, seemed unsurprising if not ideal. In other words, all the ways that life feels like life at age fifty-five were strewn around me like poppies.

Enjoy.