Anyone who knows author Richard Ford knows he is unfailingly gracious, and this was true when he agreed to a telephone interview after flying in from London and then driving three hours north to his home in Maine. He had been in the United Kingdom for 10 days promoting his new book, “The Lay of the Land” and said he had done readings in Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh and other cities. It was 10 p.m. his time and I would have expected Ford to be tired, but we talked for an hour and then stopped only because I was tired.
Question: This is the third book in your triptych about Frank Bascombe, starting with “The Sportswriter,” which was published in 1986, so it’s taken up at least 20 years of your life. Did you always feel you were working on a massive project or did you feel you were done after “Independence Day” in 1995?
Answer: Actually, it’s been 25 years, and I have much perspective on such a period of time, to have done these books over that time. I’m happy today. I tend not to think much about time elapsed. I’d have been doing something in between 1981 and now. And because I wrote other books in between, this doesn’t seem like all I did in that time. These books just seem to be part of a full life. I don’t evaluate this time in terms of these books. But still, I’m just glad I wrote the books.
Q: Two other contemporary writers who worked on one character through several novels come to mind, Philip Roth and John Updike. Did you think about them while you were working on Frank Bascombe?
A: I read Updike and Roth, but I never really thought much about them in these specific terms. I think it’s probably true that Updike’s writing the Rabbit books made it clear to me that such connected books could be written. But that’s about all.
Q: America has always been about turf, going back to Westward expansion, the Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny. The basis of our legal system, like England’s, is property rights and the American Dream is to own your own home. So it strikes me as appropriate that you make Frank a Realtor, the inheritor of the American Dream perhaps?
A: Coming from a poor state – Mississippi – I don’t think I have the standard notions of the American Dream. As regards Frank, I just tried really to give him an occupation that didn’t need much training because I didn’t want to write about a lot of training. Finding that real estate tied into larger American concerns – some of the ones you mention – seems pretty fortuitous, but also lucky.
Q: As one might expect, your writing style has evolved in these three books. While in the earlier books, Frank is more succinct, even terse, here he’s elegiac, thoughtful.
A: Over the course of your life, you learn and accumulate a lot of stuff that you want to put in your books. And style is partly a function of developing sentences that hold what you want the book to contain. So the sentences in this book are longer because I began to realize all the stuff I could get in them. The difficulty, of course, was getting those sentences under control. The principle difference between this book and the others is that it’s funnier than the other two.
Q: As the novel opens, Frank is recovering from prostate cancer surgery and is living alone after his second wife has left him. What’s funny about that?
A: Well, Frank (with my supervision) elects to treat these things as humorous. It’s nothing more complicated than that. What’s funny about Oliver Hardy getting hit in the head with a plank? It gets staged as being funny. Laughter is a saving and consoling thing, part of the way we think about what we are.
Q: One thing that is striking about all your novels is the use of what I’d call essential detail, not just about real estate, but also about second marriages, parenting, all things you haven’t directly experienced in your life.
A: I’ve always been curious about other people, about their lives. It’s a big part of why I became a writer. You could call it empathy. And in spite of Hemingway’s dictum that we write only about what we know, it’s always been writers’ jobs (if they choose to undertake it) to project others’ lives. The fact that I haven’t had these experiences in my life isn’t really very important to me, nor is it necessarily a limitation. Acts of imagination can add to the facts what the facts themselves can’t contribute to our understanding.
Q: So you don’t see much of yourself in Frank, despite the fact you’re about the same age, the same ethnicity?
A: I don’t think Frank’s very much like me at all. We don’t agree about all that much, though we’re both Democrats. We probably disagree about raising children and we probably disagree about divorce. I would have fought not to divorce Ann (Frank’s first wife) and I disagree with Frank about his disapproval of his son Paul working for Hallmark in Kansas City. I think Hallmark’s a great American company. Frank also takes solace in things I couldn’t. He loves the suburban world, for example. I’d like to feel the way he does, but the truth is I don’t. But you might discover something he and I agree about. Every time I go there, for instance, I’m surprised the Jersey Shore isn’t as nice a place as Frank thinks it is – even though I quite like it and would be happy to live there. It seems a larger and more potentially useful project to write not about yourself, but about behavior, events, motives that are apart from oneself.
Q: In “The Lay of the Land,” you describe Frank as being in The Permanent Period of life, “a time of being, not becoming.” Can you tell me more about that?
A: The Permanent Period is one of the tenets I started this book with. It’s that period for which one will be remembered after one has died. It follows the Existence Period, which was in “Independence Day.” It’s a period of middle life when you’ve successfully slipped the grip of the past, when you don’t fear the future, and indeed when there’s not enough life left even to screw the future up.
It’s imagined as a period of relative satisfaction, low anxiety – something a person can identify as permanent. When I started “The Lay of the Land,” I thought The Permanent Period would run out to the end of Frank’s life. But then he does exit out of it and he goes to what I (and he) call The Next Level, which is a period of acceptance of all those things – the past, the future – that he’d imagined he’d escaped. The Next Level is a more stirring, more testing period – at least that’s what I imagined.
Q: At the end of the book, Frank is still there, still recovering from cancer and his difficult relationships with children and ex-wives. But is this the end for Frank as a character or will there be another book about him?
A: No, I think this is enough. This particular book was also testing enough that my wife made me promise not to do it again. Writers can’t complain that their work is hard, since nobody asked us to do it. But if I were to be allowed to complain, I might.
David Milofsky is a Denver novelist and professor of English at Colorado State University.
