Frank Bascombe, the hero of Richard Ford’s much loved novels “The Sportswriter” (1985) and “Independence Day” (1996), is 55 now.

Nobody ever called middle age heroic, and as if to stress the point Frank labels it the Permanent Period — nowhere to go from here — in “The Lay of the Land”. Unheroic phrases like “I don’t really mind it” and “It’s not so bad” pepper his narrative. This is a book about acceptance.

And Frank has a lot to accept. He’s still getting over the death of his young son many years earlier. His second wife has left him under freakish “Enoch Arden” circumstances. He has “a touch of cancer” (prostate). His daughter has come to help out, but his son, who writes greeting-card texts for Hallmark, nurses an old rage, and Frank thinks he’s weird anyway. Still, business (selling real estate on the Jersey shore) is good, and so, for the most part, are Frank’s spirits.

Acceptance is also something a reader of this book has to practice. “My time in the USMC, three decades back,” Frank says, “made me promise myself that if I got out alive, I’d never hasten a step as long as I lived.... I pretty much haven’t.” And he pretty much doesn’t. “The Lay of the Land” stretches out for nearly 500 pages, but it feels more like 5,000 — though, oddly, I mean that as a compliment. The way the book goes on and on and never gets anywhere much feels remarkably lifelike. (To the extent that it’s shaped at all it seems compromised.) It’s this genius for texture, with a flood of detail, that I think makes it valid to call Ford’s approach American Tolstoyan.

Middle age has a built-in pathos: “We all emanate a sense of youth lost and tragedy-on-the-horizon,” Frank says. And, form following function, the novel embodies a kind of over-the-hillness itself. It’s really a book for an earlier era of hefty attention spans, with barely a mention of e-mail or the Internet (not to mention September 11 — it’s set over three days in 2000). And how obsolescent is that?

Still, even with this overlay of melancholy, “The Lay of the Land” is a lighthearted book. It seems to shrug and ask, “Well, what can you do?” Frank’s one-liners consistently cracked me up. Ford doesn’t take anything too seriously — which is the nature of his seriousness. “I do not credit the epiphanic, the seeing-through that reveals all, triggered by a mastering detail,” Frank says. “These are lies of the liberal arts to distract us from the more precious here and now.”

“The Lay of the Land” is way too low-key to be considered a masterpiece, but even its lack of greatness works in its favour. There’s a profundity simmering in its immense likeability that grandeur would overwhelm. It’s a big, friendly palooka of a book written for readers who aren’t in too much of a hurry, and, as Frank might say, that’s not so bad. “The Lay of the Land” is published by Alfred A. Knopf (485 pages, $26.95).