With the publication of THE LAY OF THE LAND, the final installment in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, Richard Ford is certainly doing the publicity rounds. But the NYT's Charles McGrath gets there first with a setting-themed profile about the Jersey shore, where Bascombe left behind sportswriting to try his hand at real estate. "I had to figure out what a person like him could change his occupation to be," said Ford, visiting Asbury Park from his home base of Maine (with frequent stops in New Orleans, where he and his wife own a house). "I thought about making him a guy who ran a hotel, but then I thought, Frank as Basil Fawlty really isn’t going to work."

Ford, born and raised in Mississippi, discovered the Jersey Shore in the late 1970s, when he and his wife were living in Princeton, where he had a teaching job. After years of being "university mice," he said, they felt newly liberated, but they were also house-poor, and so for recreation on the weekends they hopped into the car and just drove around. The shore quickly became one of their favorite destinations, and even after they moved away, he continued to feel what he now calls a "tidal pull" in that direction.

"People always think of New Jersey as something like the back of an old radio," he said. "But I thought, oh no, it isn't — it's quite wonderful, and I began to think that I could write a novel that would be a paean to New Jersey." And so he did - with two sequels thereafter.