The Lay of the Land Richard Ford Bloomsbury, 496pp, £17.99 ISBN 0747581886

Everyman may be the title of Philip Roth's latest novel, but the epithet is perhaps better suited to Frank Bascombe, the narrator of Richard Ford's trilogy that began with The Sportswriter (1986), continued with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995) and concludes with The Lay of the Land, an elegiac novel of resignation and regret.

Set in 2000, before 9/11 altered the American psyche, The Lay of the Land follows 55-year-old Bascombe as he plans Thanksgiving dinner for his two children and his first wife, Ann. His second marriage has collapsed. As he notes: "The thing about second marriages - unlike first ones, which require only hot impulses and drag-strip hormones - is that they need good reasons to exist, reasons you're smart to pore over and get straight well beforehand." Meanwhile, Ann, who teaches at the outrageously upmarket, amusingly named prep school De Tocqueville Academy, suggests they give their relationship a second chance.

A victim of prostate cancer, he is in remission and resigned to the "Permanent Period", his euphemism for late middle age. His garrulousness has been replaced by gloominess, and he is more or less cleansed of desire. His attention focuses on his 25-year-old daughter, Clarissa, a Harvard-educated former lesbian who is now involved with a much older man. Clarissa is never a plausible or precise character, perhaps because she is at an age that does not lend itself to easily imitated tics and predictable developmental frustrations, or perhaps because Ford is more comfortable writing about men.

Clarissa "sometimes profane, will mutter sarcastically under her breath, likes to read but doesn't finally say much". This reads like an internet profile rather than a textured characterisation. When she does speak, she says things such as: "In the girl community, this wouldn't stand up." In other words, she speaks like a 25-year-old on an American sitcom rather than an actual American 25-year-old. Clarissa's lesbianism, her sudden conversion to heterosexuality and her older boyfriend are all contrivances.

When Ford emerged in the 1980s, his clipped, incisive style was labelled "dirty realist", but The Lay of the Land is too often messy when it should be dirty: it would have been more successful at half its length. The novel works best as a series of vignettes, which is what Ford ultimately excels at. Though set in the fictitious town of Haddam, New Jersey, the Bascombe trilogy - its narrative a model of rationality, sobriety and sensitivity - reads like a celebration of the ethos of the Midwest, where Ford grew up. Ford is an exemplary chronicler of middle-class American life, and Haddam is as indelibly evoked as John Updike's Brewer, Pennsylvania, and John Cheever's Shady Hill.

As end-of-the-line novels go, The Lay of the Land isn't nearly as powerful as Everyman or J M Coetzee's Slow Man (2005) or Rabbit at Rest (1990), the final instalment in Updike's Rabbit tetralogy and the book it most closely resembles. In one fine scene, Bascombe describes his second wife walking "around the room, suffusing the dark space she was then abandoning me to with a bronze funeral-parlor light". The Lay of the Land is suffused with a funereal light - one can't help but feel that, after three novels, it may be time that Frank Bascombe is laid to rest.

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