In “Independence Day,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, Frank sold real estate — made a bundle, in fact — in the prosperous, leafy town of Haddam, N.J., a fictional composite of Princeton, Hopewell and Pennington. In Mr. Ford’s new novel, “The Lay of the Land,” released on Oct. 24,, he has moved his base of operations some 60 miles to the east, to the Jersey Shore. Frank is 55 now (seven years younger than his creator), recovering from prostate cancer, and has embarked on what he calls the “Permanent Period,” when life “starts to look like a destination rather than a journey.”
He’s wiser than the Frank of the two previous books, a little crankier, and has also acquired a Tibetan business partner, Lobsang Dhargey, who goes by the nom de real estate of Mike Mahoney. Their office and Frank’s beachfront house are in the made-up town of Sea-Clift, a version of Seaside Heights, Seaside Park and Ortley Beach.
“The copy editors gave me a hard time about the hyphen,” Mr. Ford said. “They argued that very few place names in America are hyphenated. But I said that this was a town invented by land developers, and they would definitely want the hyphen.”
