Richard Ford

During the 1980s, when the Kmart Konvoy of that loose American school of writing called Dirty Realism was driving four abreast and turning the memory of 20th century literature into road kill, Richard Ford rode like a loner. He was American, all right, an all-American writer.

LET me be completely honest: I can't make up my mind about "The Lay of the Land." For the last few weeks, I've wrestled with it and have been alternately indifferent and enthralled.

Here I am, on a rainy May afternoon in 1996, struggling out of a taxi on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I'm carrying an umbrella, a briefcase and a couple of changes of coat and tie. Needless to say, I don't have anything close to the correct change for the cabby; it takes a drenching while to complete our transaction.

In one of Eudora Welty's early stories, "A Memory," a young girl lies by a lake. She sees the scene before her as if it were a picture or a brightly lit stage. The noon sun beats down, the water shines like steel: "I was looking at a rectangle brightly lit, actually glaring at me, with sun, sand, water, a little pavilion, a few solitary people in fixed attitudes, and around it all a border of dark rounded oak trees, like the engraved thunderclouds surrounding illustrations in the Bible."

"Chekhovian" may not roll off the tongue as easily as "Kafkaesque," yet in its way it is every bit as evocative of how we construe the 20th century. (Ironically, Chekhov and Kafka died of the quintessentially 19th century illness, consumption; they were both in their early 40s.

THIS WEEK: * Richard Ford on Chekhov's stories. * Roger Shattuck on the fatal attraction of the Marquis de Sade. * Melvin Jules Bukiet on the prophetic fiction of Joseph Roth. * Richard Eder on Michael Cunningham's brilliant new novel.

One of the literary world's favorite fiction prizes, the PEN/Faulkner award , announced its 2013 finalists Wednesday. In its 33rd year, the contenders come from publishers large and small. The finalists are Amelia Gray for "Threats," published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; "Kind One" by Laird Hunt and T. Geronimo Johnson's "Hold It 'Til It Hurts," both published by Coffee House Press; "Watergate" by Thomas Mallon, published by Pantheon; and Benjamin Alire Sáenz for "Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club," published by Cinco Puntos Press.

A Northridge woman admitted today in Los Angeles Superior Court that she helped arrange a contract murder allegedly carried out by two former Los Angeles police officers. In exchange for her testimony against former police officers Richard Ford and Robert Von Villas, prosecutors today allowed Joyce A. Reynolds, 47, to plead guilty to one count of soliciting murder. Reynolds, who had been charged with murder, will be placed on probation as a condition of the plea bargain.