Brian Duffy's study is, first and foremost, an attempt to establish Richard Ford's claims to be one of America's pre-eminent novelists. As such, it is long overdue: as Duffy points out, Ford's oeuvre is “seriously under-researched” (9), “Richard Ford studies” (as he somewhat zealously terms it) remaining largely “underdeveloped” (10). The case that Duffy makes for Ford relies heavily on his discussion of the trilogy of novels – The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006) – that follow the fortunes of Frank Bascombe, an “arch-ordinary American” whose personal history reflects the changing social and political landscape of his nation in ways rather reminiscent of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the protagonist of John Updike's sequence of “Rabbit” books. Duffy announces, on the opening page of his introduction, that one of his main objectives is “to provide a wide-ranging and integrated commentary on the trilogy” (9), and in these terms he succeeds admirably. Duffy's reading of the trilogy is a tour de force and is likely to remain definitive for some time. However, it demands much of its readers: it is exhaustive but also rather exhausting, “tak[ing its] leisurely time” (9), as Duffy says of the novels themselves, to trace each twist and turn of Ford's complex protagonist's consciousness and conscience.

This total immersion in the trilogy is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand, Duffy's critique impressively illuminates the psychological subtleties and ambiguities of Frank's character, while at the same time emphasizing Ford's preoccupation with the cultural, economic and political forces that have shaped America over the two decades covered by the trilogy. On the other hand, the study as a whole has a somewhat lopsided, insular feel to it: lopsided in that Duffy neglects much of Ford's earlier work, in particular the fine short-story collection Rock Springs (1987) (in a study that runs to 368 pages, he mentions it only once); insular in that Duffy never engages with the work of any of Ford's contemporaries. Instead of situating Ford in relation to other American novelists, Duffy contextualizes his fiction in theoretical terms, drawing heavily on the work of Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur. How much these theorists contribute to Duffy's interpretation of Ford's work is debatable: Duffy takes great pains to emphasize the connections between them, pointing out, for example, that Frank's assessment of himself towards the end of the trilogy “echo[es] the theories of identity of MacIntyre, Taylor and Ricoeur” (159). Yet the terms that Frank uses in the statement that Duffy is referring to (“When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it's just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it” (159)), are hardly unique to this triumvirate of philosophers. Perhaps it is the banality of Frank's own philosophy – of which this example is characteristic – that prompts Duffy to recruit Ricoeur et al., but more often their ideas (at least those that Duffy cites) are hardly more revelatory: “As Charles Taylor reminds us … characters move through time in their temporal trajectories, leaving the past, inhabiting the present and tending towards the future” (15). If, as Duffy claims, “Ford … has found a language and an idiom to raise the generally unexceptional experience of suburban daily life out of its apparent banality and into a literary form of deceptive complexity and impressive philosophical substance” (313), then he does not need to appeal to stale truisms such as Taylor's to lend credibility to his study.

Duffy's book will be invaluable to Ford scholars but is not, I fear, likely to gain Ford a new audience. Duffy's knowledge and appreciation of Ford's work is unquestionable, but what is missing is a sense of why non-specialists should read Ford. It is perhaps unfair to criticize a book for sins of omission, but some sense of his relationship with his predecessors and contemporaries – of his place in the canon of American literature – and more attention to Ford's interest in the short-story form, evidenced not only by the three collections that he has authored but by his editorship of two volumes of contemporary American short stories published by Granta, would have helped in this regard. Duffy's book finishes with a fascinating interview with Ford but this heightens the impression of missed opportunities, since Ford mentions a number of contemporary American authors – Kurt Vonnegut, Walker Percy, Joseph Heller, Frederick Exley, John Gardner and Sam Shephard (all 347) – as well as Henry James (340) and D. H. Lawrence (345), whose connections with his own work, had Duffy explored them, would have made this a more expansive and less parochial book.