A linguistic edifice

When publishers, with heavy heart, stamp "literary fiction" on books nowadays, they generally mean to brand them as serious in intent, not hitching a lift on genre or journalistic trends. The Lay of the Land is literary in that it is an entirely linguistic edifice. What happens? Frank's consciousness happens. Unlike his short stories, which found "success" only when sold to Hollywood back in the 1960s, it is practically screenproof.

From James Campbell's TLS review of Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land.