Interview with Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land

By David Cross

The first thing you notice when you meet Richard Ford is that he is tall; tall and lanky, a mix between Ichabod Crane and Clint Eastwood. This physical stature is fitting for a man widely considered to be a literary giant. Early in his career, Ford was compared to Faulkner, probably for the sole reason that they both shared a southern heritage. (This despite the fact that Ford moved from the south at his earliest opportunity. "I never wanted to believe that because of the accident of birth I had to be this way or that way," he says). Later it was Hemingway he was compared to, and then Updike. Hopefully the time has come where we can appreciate the Pulitzer Prize-winning author as the truly unique writer that he is. His books and short stories are awe-inspiring and contain the kind of meticulous and carefully crafted psychological storytelling that many writers aspire to. Like all geniuses, he somehow makes it look easy.

Ford spends the bulk of his time in Maine, New Orleans, and Montana, but I am able to catch up with him in Philadelphia because he is currently on tour for his new novel, the third installment of a series about his greatest and most famous protagonist, the New Jersian real estate agent Frank Bascombe. This novel, The Lay of the Land, is a fitting follow-up to its precursor, Independence Day, which is to say that it will justifiably be considered a classic, both in its own right and as a part of this series. We lunch at the Four Seasons where-- to paraphrase John Mortimer's Old Bailey hack, Horace Rumpole-- people are rich enough to buy food in very small portions. "Not long after I finished Independence Day I sort of felt, well, I think I will take a crack some time in the future in writing about Frank," he tells me as he bites into one of his three slices of salmon. "But I didn't really have much of a glimmering about what the book would be about and what it would be like. I thought maybe I would set it at Thanksgiving but, you know, the year 2000 had to occur for me to decide that that was the proper time to set it. So I had some ideas but they were a-building all the time. When I buckled down to it in the winter of 2002, that's when I really started working on it."

His decision to write a novel occurring during the period after the election but before the president was chosen was an inspired one, as the period mirrors the turbulence that Bascombe is suffering personally. "I thought it would be a recognizable time in the life of most Americans," Ford says. "I thought it was a moment that almost begged for a certain type of reflection that no one had done at the time. That it needed to be showcased in essence as a time of a kind of peculiar moral lethargy in the American culture and in the American populace. I mean, we had no government! They're down there in Florida basically fighting out the battle of America down there. It put to mind something I always think about how Americans are so fiercely attached to their versions of normalcy and how you just have to practically detonate them out of it."

It is not an easy time for Frank Bascombe, now fifty-five. His wife has left him for her long-lost first husband, and he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. I asked Ford whether writing about a man with cancer and spending years researching and imagining what that life would be like, had a bad effect on him. "Yeah," he says, unhesitatingly. "I'm hypochondriacal to start with and I had to read a lot about cancer and I became very sensitized to how many people around me had it and were being treated for it and were suffering from it and having their lives changed miserably because of it. It actually did get me down." He became so concerned, in fact, that he skipped out on his annual checkup at the Mayo Clinic. "I thought that if I went and did all of my blood work and I had something wrong with me I wouldn't finish my book, that it would derail me in some way, it would make me feel so upset and twisted that I wouldn't get it done." 
           

Although Bascombe has moved from Haddam to the seaside, he continues to live in New Jersey. "Originally, my wife said to me, try to write about somebody who's happy," Ford tells me. "I began to think, well, where could I set a book about somebody who was happy?"  It came to him that New Jersey and suburbs in general always took a literary beating. "Cheever, Yates, and Roth had taken a lot of the piss out of the suburbs so I just thought, well, I'm going to do something else." He created a mythical suburb in New Jersey, Haddam, that was not merely a trash dump where people found themselves after giving up on their higher aspirations. Suburbs, he says, are "part of our environment. And just to always have, as our attitude, this is crap, this is crap, this is crap, this is horrible, this is an eyesore, I hate this, have it always be your mantra didn't seem so healthy." So he set out to "generate a vocabulary of affirmation for what was traditionally and conventionally thought of as not affirmable." 

Ford considers The Lay of the Land to be a political book (although "not high-dollar political") and finds it "essential" for him to write political novels in order "to get my view out." In a time where the media has shunned its responsibility at seeking the truth from a non-partisan point of view, Ford takes seriously the novelist's duty to speak out on issues currently facing the country. "We don't have a constituency," he says, speaking of fiction writers. "We are not beholden to anyone."

The Lay of the Land may have moderately political overtones, but it is about the kind of everlasting questions that outlive the petty partisan quarrels of the moment. By writing these three novels in Bascombe's singularly observant voice, Ford has created a complex and intriguing character for the ages, a character with enough edges to sustain our curiosity indefinitely. "What interests me is how we as human beings reconcile ourselves to the consequences of our acts," Ford tells me. "I think that's where moral life mostly resides. I mean, as human beings, we're largely capable of anything, it seems to me. Most of us are. But how we then accommodate the acts into our hearts, how we reconcile the behavior to our sense of ourselves, how in fact those acts play out into the future, that's what I'm interested in." He lets the thought lay there for awhile before continuing. "I think we all spend most of our lives in the 'ly' of our acts. On the back side of our larger acts, statements, commitments. We're living our lives after these things."

Although as a child Ford was interested in the concept of being a writer (his mother pointed out Eudora Welty to him and told him she was "a writer," and from the way she said the word he instinctively knew it was something special) he bounced around with a number of potential aspirations when younger. Initially, he wanted to work in hotel management; later on, his interest was in working for the FBI or CIA. He even went to law school for one semester at Washington University but quit, partly because he was discouraged with law school, but mainly because he fell in love with a girl who lived in New York. "So love intervened," he says, smiling at the memory. He certainly has no regrets over that decision. He married the girl at the age of twenty-three and remains joyously married today, in stark contrast to the majority of stories he writes, which are full of torturous relationships marked by deceit and disappointment. "I just blundered into it," he says of his decision to start writing fiction. "No higher power has ever informed any of my decisions," he says with the laughter of one who clearly has done all right without the benefit of such guidance.

David Cross is a full-time freelance writer in the Philadelphia area who has printed articles in numerous local and internet publications. He is currently writing a biography of jazz saxophonist Art Pepper, and his e-mail address is davidpcross@hotmail.com.
 

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