Independence Day.

IN several promising novels and a book of short stories, Richard Ford covered some ground, literally: Mississippi to Mexico to Montana. He really established his reputation as an up-and-coming heavy hitter, however, with The Sportswriter (1986), which introduced us to some characters and a setting that most book reviewers could more easily get with: writer Frank Bascombe, Frank's soon-to-be-ex-wife, Ann, and the town of Haddam, New Jersey. Now Bascombe is back, in a book hyped as what the Great American Novel would look like if such a thing were any longer possible. Could this be?

It's 1988, Ann has remarried and left Haddam with the children, but Frank is still there, and he's selling real estate, or trying to. After a hundred pages, about all that has happened is that Frank has shown a house to a couple and they haven't decided whether to buy it or not. You may begin to suspect that this is going to be a book in which nothing much does happen, and this suspicion is largely borne out. Sure, a few things happen nearby, but even a murder in the same motel has no consequences for the story. Promising characters float past -- a trucker, a waitress, some trashy tenants, what passes these days for a good buddy, Frank's fellow realtors, his ex-wife's new husband -- but they just make brief appearances and never return. Most seem to be more interesting than Frank himself, but his current lady friend is an exception. She says things like, 'Something's crying out to be noticed. I just don't know what it is. But it must have to do with you and I. Don't you agree?' (Frank has no idea what she's talking about, and he's not the only one.)

Anyway, Frank visits this woman, he visits his ex-wife, he takes his unhappy son to the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, the kid gets beaned by a pitching machine, and that's about it for plot. Lord knows the man has problems, but (aside from putting his difficult clients in a rental property) he doesn't resolve much of anything. If Ford's saving all that for his next book it strikes me as a mistake, because it means that, basically, this one is just you and Frank Bascombe for 448 pages, and the question becomes, Is this the kind of guy you want to hang out with?

My guess is that for most female readers the answer will be no: they'll be reminded of irritating old boyfriends, or first husbands. Some middle-aged men may identify with Frank now and again, but I'm here to tell you that's not always a treat either.

Frank is actually at his best when he's talking about his job; in fact, the romance of real estate has never had a more articulate spokesman. He really believes that 'you don't sell a house to someone, you sell a life.' He gave up writing to become a realtor, he says, because 'in this way I could pursue my original plan to do for others while looking after Number One, which seemed a good aspiration as I entered a part of life when I'd decided to expect less, hope for modest improvements, and be willing to split the difference.' He likes selling real estate, he's good at it, and he has some idea why: 'My greatest human flaw and strength, not surprisingly, is that I can always imagine anything -- a marriage, a conversation, a government -- as being different from how it is, a trait that might make one a top-notch trial lawyer or novelist or realtor, but that also seems to produce a somewhat less than reliable and morally feasible human being.'

Trouble is, it also seems to produce someone who's less than stimulating company. Frank is almost a caricature of a self-absorbed leading-edge babyboomer; he has aged, but he hasn't grown up. He gives us a lot of tedious reflection along these lines: 'A successful practice of my middle life, a time I think of as the Existence Period, has been to ignore much of what I don't like or that seems worrisome and embroiling, and then usually see it go away.' Most of his fortysomething wisdom is bogus, such stuff as 'ole Davy Crockett's motto, amended for use by adults: Be sure you're not completely wrong, then go ahead,' or 'It's not true that you can get used to anything, but you can get used to much more than you think and even learn to like it.'

Unfortunately he's right when he says, 'I'm no hero, as my wife suggested years ago.' And despite having hurt a good many people he's not a real villain, because, damn it, he means well. You can tell because he's for Michael Dukakis in the election that's going on just outside the novel's field of vision. This detail adds to the general impression of ineffectuality, but Frank's not a fool (at least he's not very funny). Nor is he a victim of anything but his own fecklessness. What he is, as he puts it himself at one point, is 'a doofus.' (I'd have said a nebbish, but that's close enough.)

Now, this may seem an odd thing for a Mississippian to be, even one who lives in New Jersey. But it's not unprecedented. We've seen similar well-meaning, dissociated, displaced Southerners before. 'Of course,' Frank says, 'having come first to life in a true place, and one as monotonously, lankly itself as the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I couldn't be truly surprised that a simple setting such as Haddam -- willing to be so little itself -- would seem, on second look, a great relief and damned easy to cozy up to.' Recognize the tone?

This is Walker Percy country, of course. The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman went over much of this ground, and if you like early Percy, you could like this book. But not as much.