Richard Ford is one of the most acclaimed writers of our time and is widely recognized as one of America’s premiere prose stylists. He is the author of the novels A Piece of My Heart (1976), The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), The Sportswriter (1986), Wildlife (1990), and Independence Day (1996), which was the first novel to be awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction. He has also written several collections of stories, including Rock Springs (1987), Women with Men: Three Stories (1997), and A Multitude of Sins (2002). Ford is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, past winner of the Pen/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction, and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In November of 2006 Ford published his newest novel, The Lay of the Land, which completes the Frank Bascombe trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and was followed by Independence Day. Like John Updike’s Rabbit series, these three novels by Ford make up an elaborate exploration of one American male’s journey through adulthood, romance, profession, and fatherhood. Ford and Updike extend their discussions well beyond the stories of their protagonists: both are concerned with the nature of American culture and society, as well as many of the problems that plague our nation. Since The Lay of the Land promises to remain a significant American novel of the early twenty-first century, we felt ourselves fortunate to be able to enter into extensive conversations with Ford as he was completing work on it in the fall of 2006. In February 2008, we were able to have some follow-up conversation about the novel’s reception and Ford’s retrospective thoughts about his newest novel and the entire trilogy.

Richard Ford: Photo: Jeanne Halpern, 2007 © Star Black
Richard Ford
Photo: Jeanne Halpern, 2007 © Star Black

Q: How has the critical and popular response been for The Lay of the Land?

Ford: I don’t know very much about the critical and popular response. I try to avoid noticing reviews—not because I’m too grand, but just because the upsy-downsy of it tends to knock my bubble off the middle of my level. Oh, Kristina told me about one real good one —in the Sunday New York Times; and I know there was a bad one in the daily New York Times. Someone sent me a good one from the New York Review of Books. But that’s about the extent of what I heard of reviews. I know the book was on a lot of “Best” books lists at the end of 2006—again the Times Book Review, and several in Britain. It was a bestseller in Germany. I think it’s being published in twenty-plus countries. As to popular response, I did meet readers when I was running around on my extended book tour. I like doing that—meeting readers. But it’s hardly an accurate assay. The citizens who come to meet me rarely want to tell me what a terrible book I’ve written. Those other people tend to harbor their angers in private. Writing The Lay of the Land was sufficiently flattening to me that I just didn’t quite revive in time to be aware of the response. But that’s probably as it ought to be. One cares the most, gives one’s all, in the writing of a book—not in the waiting around to see what the intended readership says. Although I did write the book so people would read it, and I wanted people who did read it to like it. I’m clear about that.

Q: Do you wish to make any comments about all the things that have been written about The Lay of the Land?

Ford: No. I don’t know much about what was written. But even if I did, I wouldn’t have any comments to make. All my comments, you might say, went into the book itself. That way, I’m saved from writing those horrible “the author replies” letters to the TBR and to the New York Review. I always feel sorry for writers who do that. And it’s not because I don’t get a good share of shabby reviews. I think all of us who write fiction get some shabby reviews. But I don’t respond because it’s pointless. Can you imagine writing a complaining letter about an unfair review, and having the reviewer just capitulate? “Oh, gee. You’re right. I got it all wrong. Sorry. My bad.”

Q: In retrospect, what surprised you most about the writing of The Lay of the Land?

Ford: I really don’t know the answer to this question, either. I’m not much of a “mosts” kind of guy. Like all people who write long novels, I was pleasantly surprised that my constructions finally made any sense at all. I was happy (though not surprised) that the book is as inclusive as it is—that it has a sense of humor and pathos in it (what James called “bliss and bale”), and that it includes as much of visible and audible and articulable American culture as it does. I was happy to be able to extend the concerns of the first two books intelligibly into the third. I was happy the three books make a whole, taken together. I was happy to have gotten to work real hard at a really big project that took considerable time to finish, and to believe that the whole enterprise had something to give to a readership.

Q: In retrospect, what is your overall sense of the Bascombe trilogy, and the manner in which The Lay of the Land brings it to a close?

Ford: I think the actual bringing to a close had to do with Frank’s feeling that he’d made some progress in integrating his son’s death into his own continuing life. (I don’t mean to talk about my book as though I didn’t write it, or as though Frank figures these things out for himself.) But I think the passage in the book, near the end of Part Two, where grief overcomes Frank and he realizes that his many efforts to resolve Ralph’s death were actually improvisations, and yet nonetheless he’s still managed a reasonably productive, even enjoyable, life in the face of those failures (including Ralph’s death)—I think that’s a good piece of intelligence to have dreamed up. I don’t mean by saying this that this is what The Lay of the Land’s value is for me. Its value can only be expressed by its every single word, which I intended every reader to encounter.

Q: At one point when we spoke in 2006, you suggested that with the completion of this epic trilogy, you may never write another novel. Where are you at psychologically and emotionally nowadays with your writing? Do you intend to return to novels one day?

Ford: I don’t think I ever said I’d never write another novel. I may have said I might not ever write another novel. And I may have said that I doubt if I’d ever write another novel as long or as complicated (for myself) as The Lay of the Land—not that it was so long. Lots of people write novels that are longer. But for me it was long. I probably meant that I write novels by giving each one of them my absolute all. And so when I’m finished it’s usually hard to see how I could find another all to give to another book. But just to write a novel, long or not so long, one has to have a lot of important stuff to put in it and use up, and a lot of energy for the whole enterprise. My energy and accumulated material was all used up finishing The Lay of the Land—just as it should’ve been. Now, in the winter of 2008, I’m starting to write some stories, and I’ve agreed to write a shorter novel—one I’ve had in mind for two decades, a novel set in Saskatchewan. So, I guess I’m feeling replenished enough to imagine that.

Q: Let’s talk a little about your process of writing. You’ve mentioned in other interviews your notebooks. For example, when you began Independence Day, you have stated that the word “independence” kept showing up in your notes. Which words, concepts, or ideas showed up in The Lay of the Land?

Ford: In The Lay of the Land, “acceptance” had become a pregnant word. “Thanksgiving” was another—and so the novel’s set at Thanksgiving. Writing in notebooks provokes me and offers me the chance to do what writers do, which is to seize on a word and see what I can attach to it. Don DeLillo said that writing is a concentrated form of thinking, and so in a sense that’s what I do. These words come up into my thinking and then I attach new things to them—new contexts, new meanings, new associations—as a way of thinking about them. I ask such questions as: “Thanksgiving, well, what’s that all about in American culture?” “How do we Americans do it?” “Why is giving thanks important to us?” Questions like that. To me, it’s interesting to write about American culture—not because I think it’s the greatest culture in the world, but because it happens to be mine, and I want to know more about it. So then I think, what do we have to be thankful for? What does it mean to be thankful for something? I try to put these inquiries and ruminations into the minds and mouths of characters and make up the answers. That’s one kind of moral inquiry—at least it’s my kind. What’s good about this, what’s not good.

Q: Of course, the main agent for that has been your protagonist, Frank Bascombe.

Ford: Yes. In The Lay of the Land, which happens during what he calls “the permanent period”—“permanence” was also one of those words floating around in my head when I started that book. But the “acceptance” is where the book really does spend a lot of its time. Frank, at age fifty-five, comes to a sense of acceptance about the death of his son, and in some ways comes to realize that he hasn’t really experienced acceptance all these years, even though he thought he had. He coexisted with his son’s death, but he’d never accepted it. So I had to come up with a language for acceptance that’s different from just accommodation, since accommodation can occur without acceptance. This is one of the things novelists can do—they can reburnish and refurnish the way we use language. I tried to write into that volume what acceptance actually is.

Frank has cancer in this novel, and his wife Anne is back in his life and tries, at least fitfully, to reinsert herself even further into his life. That’s another thing that Frank has to try to accept. Because he has cancer and she feels sorry for him, she reaches out to him and says that maybe they should get back together since they have so much in common. But then one of the things Frank figures out is that by getting divorced as they did, in the aftermath of having their child die, they actually prevented themselves from getting divorced like any two regular people would have gotten divorced—for the age-old and perfectly acceptable reason that they never really loved each other enough in the first place. Which he also realizes and accepts: that he never loved Anne enough. That they never were fully able just to look at each other and say “You know, I didn’t really love you that much at all way back then.” So, a part of acceptance for Frank is the acceptance of saying—to Anne: “You know, the reason we haven’t gotten back together all these years and have just stayed orbited to each other without ever getting any closer is . . . we don’t want to be closer to each other.” So that’s one of his acceptances. It’s better in the book. Which is one of the troubles with us writers talking about what we write. Either we make writing sound like a Lego set, or else we make our books sound a lot more boring than they even might be. Or we do both.

Q: What’s the relation between acceptance and thanksgiving? I mean thanksgiving as a word.

Ford: I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think that I’ve actually felt the need to join those two notions. Maybe that makes it a less good novel for not having all its parts perfectly mitered.

Q: Can you talk a little about how you write on the sentence level?

Ford: You don’t just write a sentence once, you write it from start to finish once, then you write it from finish to start, and you change words in it and your sentences eventually become rather mosaical—much more than they are linear creations. I’m talking about myself when I say “you,” of course. One (maybe this is better) is always adding things to sentences and taking things out just as you do the parts of the novel itself. You move parts around and you take parts out and you make things elliptical here and you enjamb things there and the whole becomes a construction more than a linear, progressing, questing thing heading toward an end. Though of course it’s that, too.

Q: How does the Frank Bascombe trilogy come to its conclusion?

Ford: At the end of the novel, Frank is thankful—to be alive. He’s not thankful in a Judeo-Christian sense, but simply to have all his senses and faculties, to be aware of himself and to not be dead. The book ends with Frank and his wife Sally on a Northwest jet coming down to Rochester, Minnesota, where Frank’s going for a check-up at the Mayo Clinic. As they descend, he sees the earth get realer and realer and realer and revels in what he calls the resumption of life on a human scale.

Q: Is that Sally from Independence Day?

Ford: Yes.

Q: My understanding is you’ve never had children yourself.

Ford: No, I haven’t, and neither has my wife.

Q: Have you known people who have lost children, or is that just something that you had to try to imagine?

Ford: I had to try to imagine it. But, I don’t think a lot of things are that hard to imagine. I mean, I was an only child of older parents who doted on me. And I know, for instance, how much my mother was fearful that something terrible would happen to me. And not just fearful for me, but fearful for herself, fearful of what would happen to her and my father if something bad did happen, and how she would feel because of it. So it isn’t hard to project yourself into a set of emotions that aren’t those you’ve actually experienced. You might say that this is in the novelist’s job description. And it’s also true that without the actual experience, one might bring to light much that’s not conventionally known or expected.

Q: The title of the new book, The Lay of the Land: was that always the title?

Ford: Yes, it was always the title.

Q: Can you make any remarks about the choice of title?

Ford: I wanted it to mean, and for the book to employ it, in the conventional sense: “This is the way things are displayed around us.” But I also know that a “lay” is a long poem, in the old Scottish sense of lay. A long narrative of exploits. Not that I think my novel is a poem. I don’t think that.

Q: It seems clear to anyone who reads your works that they are character driven. So what is the relation between character and fate when you’re working on a novel like The Lay of the Land?

Ford: Frankly, I don’t believe in character. That is, I don’t believe in the old Greek sense of character—a core, a permanent moral essence that we’re all supposed to contain or display or enact. I’ve never found it to be true—of myself or anybody else. I realize we all have pasts and presents and potential futures—an accumulation of behavior and desire and intention and understanding. But that doesn’t make a character—not to me. Instead, I’ve always found “character” to be a shorthand for those who wish to ascribe permanence to the chaos that we mostly are. However, we’re probably well advised, for our own mental and emotional well-being and predictability, to pretend that we do have such things as characters.

Q: I’d like to ask a series of questions about Independence Day. I didn’t realize this until you started talking about The Lay of the Land today, but of course all three novels occur over three holidays, and they are three chronological holidays. Frank is in the spring of his adulthood when Easter occurs in the first novel. Independence Day takes place right in the heat of midlife over one Fourth of July weekend. And The Lay of the Land happens over Thanksgiving, and Frank is moving into his autumnal years, getting older. Did you think about a Thanksgiving novel in the midst of writing Independence Day?

Ford: Yes.

Q: Let me ask a few things about Independence Day. The title evokes for me the pros and cons of independence, which reminds me of Robert Bellah’s famous book Habits of the Heart. There, Bellah basically decries the extremes of American individualism, of American independence. More recently, Bellah’s conclusions have been given new life by such books as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which critiques American individualism as self-centeredness. These and many other books chastise Americans for becoming insular and dislocated from community, which I take to be one of your major concerns in a book like Independence Day. Is that a major problem at the heart of American society right now?

Ford: It’s always been a dynamic issue in American culture—distinguishing between sublime isolation and affiliation with others. You find it high and low—in the writing of the framers of the constitution, in subsequent American foreign policy (a constant pendulum swing between the two poles); and also low down—in entrepreneurship, the trickle-down economy, taxation aversion —the ambivalence individuals feel about doing for oneself versus doing for and drawing closer to one’s fellow man. It’s unidentified as such, but it’s at the heart of the whole Republican agenda—trying (unsuccessfully and often quite cynically) to split the difference, marry the two. Only nobody’s willing to give up what’s in it for the first person singular—it’s just me, out here on this craggy peak.

Q: So when you mention the Republican agenda, are you talking about the Republican Party or . . .

Ford: Yes, but also I’m talking about classic republicanism in the sense of the nation-state, in which the idea of a republic is a solo and freestanding integer involved in a complex global environment. I mean America fought for its independence, but it did so in order that it be free to affiliate with whom it chose. Americans have perverted this ideal of the founding founders into a rationale for—among other things—profit, fanaticism, unilateralism, war. Independence Day ends as it does, after quite a few perorations and dialogues which I hope are amusing and even interesting, with Frank Bascombe joining this parade of people on the Fourth of July. Frank wants to step out of his little cocoon of self-regard and his first person narration and responsibilities and join the parade of people who’re marching by. I’m fairly assured now, having written these three books, that he only partly succeeds. In The Lay of the Land I had to face, and somewhat unwillingly, that he’s still pretty insulated—which makes that book a bit more of a cautionary tale than I realized when I was starting it.

Of course, in our culture, in our economy and in our history, that sense of splendid isolation is, as I said, ingrained in the spirit of entrepreneurism, competition, winning-versus-losing, and is widely believed to be the most invigorating thing about America—that and our innate willingness to do good. It probably won’t last much longer. I think probably our culture is in decline and soon other nations will be doing whatever they do better than we do what we do, and also doing their worst even worser.

Q: Talk about your description of the “existence period” in Independence Day. It is a sort of existential frame of mind that Frank describes off and on throughout the novel. In one interview you describe it this way: “I think that the Existence Period started out in Frank’s mind as a period in which he thought he was rather independent, life was pretty much in balance and he had freedom to do what he wanted to. Then, what he discovered . . . [is that] the Existence Period is purchased at the price of isolation. . . . And, in fact, maybe you really can’t hold the world at arm’s length.” So what is the cure for the existence period?

Ford: Acceptance. Affiliation. Selling real estate was sort of my try at what I just called splitting the difference. Late on in Independence Day Frank says—I’ll misquote it, but I wrote it so who cares: “what better can a man do for another than to find him shelter?” Which means to make clear that I’m not much of an antibusiness type at heart. I come from a family of low-on-the-totem-pole business-y people—salesmen and people in the service industry. I’m just against the way most Americans—and definitely most Republicans—espouse it; i.e., the business of business is business. I’d say the business of business is to help your fellow man and along the way help yourself.

Q: Maybe that’s the point of the whole new novel.

Ford: I doubt if most good novels have single points to make—except when professors want to insist on it for their own nefarious logic-chopping, resumé-filling purposes. But it’s true Frank launches into a period, as I said before, that he calls the permanent period, which he actually talks a little bit about in Independence Day. There, he says the permanent period is that period which occurs in the second half of your life, getting on toward the time when you might die, that time of your life that you’ll be most vividly remembered for after you’re dead; a time when you’ve made most of your big mistakes, when the past doesn’t hold you back because you can’t remember it so well, a period when there’s little enough time left so that a lot more big garish mistakes are unlikely—a time, in other words, when you’re free to accept yourself— because, really, what choice have you got?

Q: It reminds me of certain stages of psychology, in particular Erik Erikson’s theory of generativity, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.

Ford: Yes, I learned about naming the stages of life from Walker Percy.

Q: You mean literally, one on one with Percy?

Ford: No, through his novel The Moviegoer, which I read in 1973. In The Moviegoer Percy has his main character, Binx Bolling, talk about what he calls “repetitions” and “rotations”—expressions that Binx uses to identify and organize experience that might otherwise go unorganized and be less intelligible. It was Percy’s own theory of generativity. I learned it at Walker’s figurative knee—but also at Sartre’s—that that was my responsibility as a novelist—if I chose to undertake it: to organize the un-organizable in experience and to give it names and to raise it to the level of reflection so that in some way it might be added to what we can think about and know and even act on. Whereas before it was just experience numinously existing and unidentified in life. So, the novelist comes along and says, “You know that time in anybody’s life that’s not long before you die? That is an identifiable period, by the way. I want you to know that’s a distinct period and that it might be important to you, since knowing it has the advantage of possibly making you able to act and to know your life better, has the advantage of making you credit your life more, et cetera. And here I have a novel that’ll dramatize that.”

Q: When I asked you, “Is there a cure for the existence period?” you immediately took us back to your discussion of The Lay of the Land.

Ford: Yes.

Q: I acknowledge what you are saying about acceptance and thanksgiving. But I wanted to know, do you feel that Frank has found the cure at the end of Independence Day, or is it just something that has to wait until this permanent period? In other words, I was asking what is the cure for the existence period? When he joins that parade at the end of the novel?

Ford: Yes. That’s what I thought when I wrote Independence Day. And as I said, when I finished The Lay of the Land, I realized that I hadn’t been entirely successful in ending Frank’s insulation—though to some extent I had, via the notion of acceptance, and in the progress he makes within his own family unit. I should also say that this feeling of Frank’s insulation in all three novels is partly just the function of all three being first-person narrations—which is a narrative mode that, I think, tends to make character-narrators seem more isolated. I mean Frank’s out selling houses every day and being a businessman in New Jersey; but then he’s also narrating a novel—which singles him out, so to speak. But even if you don’t subscribe to this, the novel (all these novels) means to engage the reader in conversation about what are quite significant human issues.

Q: That’s the beginning of acceptance.

Ford: It’s on the way, yes.

Q: Well, it’s also a bizarre ending because right before the ending, almost the last page, Frank receives a phone call in the middle of the night, and as far as I can tell there’s no real clue in the novel about who it is, or why it is there. I guess I just associate it with this voice of existential dread.

Ford: It might have been Mr. Tanks—who’s a character in the book.

Q: Yes, or it might have been Sally, or it could have been his son.

Ford: Out of the dark, out of the blue. Yes.

Q: But we just don’t know. So right before this very positive or redemptive moment of joining the parade, literally on the same page, is this kind of terror or paranoia that we all would feel if the phone rings at two-thirty in the morning and no one says anything.

Ford: Well, I never thought of it that way—as terrifying. Let’s just say it’s open for interpretation: one of which might be that there’s something out there, aware of us. Or—and readers hate this—it might just have seemed like a good and an irresistible event to put in my book, and once I did it I just decided to leave it. I wish that didn’t irritate readers so much. But maybe some readers feel that if they’re going to give over all their attention to a made-up thing, it’d better have all its lines taut and its windows spotless. It never happens that way, of course. Flannery O’Connor—and quite a fooler she was—said that Christian dogma affects writers by “guaranteeing their respect for mystery.” So that was her excuse of things that didn’t fit or entirely make sense. She thought it was “God’s way.” Me, I’m not a Christian, so I just think it’s “man’s way” for everything not to make sense, and novels are made by men—and women. But it’s because novelists feel free to do such things that all kinds of other, highly credible and useful and even beautiful bits of writing ever get written.

Q: In another interview you mentioned Walker Percy’s belief in an afterlife. You seemed to imply in that interview that you don’t believe in an afterlife, or that you just have no real sense of faith that there is one. Is that something you’re willing to take any kind of stand on?

Ford: I shouldn’t take the question lightly, I guess, since so many people think it’s important. I do, though, sometimes make very callous remarks about such things—mostly because so much evil is enacted in behalf of people’s all-important belief—as if the right to believe something conferred extraordinary authority on the believer. I’m agnostic. I just don’t see any reason to think there’s an afterlife, and I’m thoroughly persuaded by everything I see in this life that there’s not one, and there’s not a supreme being, or angels, or people who died one day and shortly afterward came back to life all for my benefit two thousand years later. I’ve made a very sizable bet that I’m right about this. But if I have any faith, it’s a faith in the imagination—which isn’t a faith that is finally so incompatible with a lot of what’s called organized religion. Though I should say that if this faith I’m espousing ascends to the level of a belief, it doesn’t confer any special authority on me—unless I use it to make something that others can use and like at no peril to themselves. And even then it’s a provisional authority; it goes away once the thing I make is finished.

Q: The wager metaphor has been used by certain people to talk about the wager on transcendence or the wager against transcendence if you want to put it in those terms.

Ford: Well, when Walker Percy was running off to confession every morning, he was also later running back home and writing novels. I just decided not to have it both ways, I’m just going to have it one way.

Q: Well, it’s not an either/or proposition, is it?

Ford: It is to me.

Q: Why is that?

Ford: Maybe I just can’t do more than one thing well in a lifetime—assuming I’ve done one thing well.

Q: I guess I was thinking more in general, just about faith or belief or religion or any of those things. I mean, you think of all the great writers who have joined their craft with their metaphysical views and beliefs—about God, the afterlife, Christianity.

Ford: Well, you can say I’ve joined my views to Christianity. I write books that Christians can (and do) read. There’s a line in Wallace Stevens in which he says, “In an age of disbelief, it is for the poet to provide the satisfactions of belief with his measure and his style.” That’s what I’ve done, I’ve tried to provide a substitute for belief in my measure and my style. If a person believed in an afterlife, a hierarchical Godhead, my novels could give that person some consolation while they’re still down here on earth, and before they find out if their bet’s paid off. But I don’t see that I ever make anything in my books be of a nature that would cause a person to lose his faith if he had one.

Q: In several interviews you talk about finding salvation in relationships, in family and friends. In one interview you call this a secular redemption that depends upon the agency of affection, intimacy, closeness, complicity. And yet story after story shows that redemption being thwarted. That’s one theme in your work. But I guess I’m also interested in this whole secular versus sacred opposition, because I tend to resist it. For example, if you talk about relationship, affection, intimacy, closeness, for many people those are very sacred things. And when you say, well, I’m giving a substitute for belief, or quoting Wallace Stevens, someone might respond, no you’re not giving us a substitute for belief, you’re giving us belief. It’s a different kind of belief. It’s a belief in a sacred thing. Some people believe that relationships are sacred. Would you care to respond to that?

Ford: I’m not very comfortable with the word sacred. Too often it gets used to suggest some kind of exclusivity—which is, of course, anti-art. But I want do go back to when you said that stories I write seem to be about redemption being thwarted, whereas I myself seem to advocate that fiction and art in general are redemptive—as if there were some contradiction you’d pried out. That isn’t at all the case. The stories that I write are not a projection of my beliefs. Stories are things I make up and give to you to use as a provocation for your own reflections, as a substitute for whatever you have on your mind at that moment, to think about this. So I might write a story about anything, it might be a story that absolutely goes against everything I believe. But if I feel like it is worthy, structurally, intellectually, spiritually, felicitously, if it’s worthy of my making it and giving it to you to read, then I’ll do that. Readers have got to get away from thinking that fictions that people write are simply projections of the writer’s belief. You ought to learn that in Lit. 101, or maybe high school. If they were only projections of the writer’s belief they wouldn’t be fictions; they’d be essays, they’d be credos. But stories are not credos per se. You might find that all of my stories, all of anybody’s stories, would maybe approximate a mosaical representation of the kinds of things that I think are important in the world. But I don’t think you’d ever actually pinpoint what I personally believe from a story I write. If I have someone kill someone in a story, you wouldn’t want to say that I think killing people is good. Or if stories are about inconstancy or dissolution or loss or insincerity, that Richard thinks these are admirable. You might say that Richard thinks these are actual human concerns we’d do well to pay closer attention to, and therefore he’s willing to put these matters into play in a story. I don’t know why this is so puzzling to people. It’s been happening that way a long time.

Q: I’m really interested to hear more about your view of fiction as a moral agent. One of the ways I teach literature is as a moral or ethical agent that is hopefully trying to make us better people, and produce a better society.

Ford: So we’re going to start with John Gardner?

Q: Well, that’s one place to start, but we can go a lot farther back than John Gardner and mention other critics like Robert Coles and Wayne Booth.

Ford: Wayne Booth was my teacher. The Rhetoric of Fiction was an important book to me when I was starting.

Q: Allow me to frame this question in terms of one of your most powerful stories, “Optimists.” I would say it is a deeply moving story, it is a very sad story.

Ford: It is sad. And I wanted it to be moving.

Q: The story is about the decline of a single family, particularly about how a mother and son end up totally estranged from one another. After many years, they run into each other in a convenience store, unable to recognize each other. The story has a very poignant ending when the mother decides to come back to say something to the son. It seems to me that you’re saying, isn’t it sad that a mother wouldn’t even recognize her own son fifteen or twenty years later when they’re standing in the same store together? Part of what that story says to me, that I think my students would pick up on, is to say “that’s not the way it’s supposed to be, mothers and sons should have a better lifelong relationship than this, this isn’t good.” Of course, you’re not advocating a tragically broken mother-son relationship, in fact I believe you’re doing the opposite. How would you respond to that?

Ford: By saying that I think that when the mother goes back to the son, and tells him “I loved your father and your father loved me and that’s how it was,” that that’s a positive, hopeful, even redemptive moment. I suppose anybody who writes realistic fiction works within a normative framework, by which I mean I acknowledge that a reader may always be silently gauging things and intuiting that “that’s not how things are supposed to be.” But inasmuch as so many things that happen to and befall us are spectacularly not how they’re supposed to be, that this notion of “supposed to” isn’t really taking us very far. And that what will take us further is to identify moments of possibility in situations that seem to have little possibility in them according to “supposed to,” or according to convention. That’s more useful as a world view than just arguing, “hey, wait, that’s not how things are supposed to be.” “Supposed to be” is the Disney version.

Q: I agree.

Ford: But, that aside, I do think that stories can do what Gardner asks fictions to do when he says that “moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and worse in human action.” It—art—just rouses those feelings by a variety of means—more means than John probably would’ve allowed or at least liked. In my story “Optimists,” here’s a mother who doesn’t recognize her son after fifteen years, and then meets him at the convenience store outside Anaconda, Montana. What a reader might think is: do you want that to happen to you? Do you want that to be your fate? If not, then the story has something to say about the human behavior that occasions that fate. Nobody’s future is preordained in that story. They act unfortunately, but they act according to their own strengths and weaknesses. And, maybe there would be reasons that you’d want that to be your fate. In other words I leave the judgment to the reader. I’m, I suppose, less normative than Gardner would be in assessing fiction for a moral agent. Gardner—I think—would just say, only write stories about things that embody the way to moral good. I’d say, put moral matters into play and see what the writer can make of them for the reader’s benefit. Sometimes it’ll turn out this way, sometimes that way. We don’t write stories by transcribing a prewritten script in our heads.

Q: Regarding your response to Gardner about not doing it in such a normative sense, you’ve also written about Chekhov, saying he’s a very moral writer.

Ford: All I meant was that Chekhov wrote about unquestionably important human matters—behavior and intention and consequence that we’d all agree had right and wrong at their heart. He was just a genius about identifying what those matters were. Most of us would probably have missed them in real life. That’s what moral means to me—a story that shows me something to be important that I hadn’t recognize as such and then imagines that thing’s consequence.

Q: But then there’s still a mystery to it, these characters aren’t giving you the exact answer of how it has to be, they’re going to have to go one living with it, you’re going to have to go on living with it.

Ford: I’m not comfortable with the term “mystery” because again I hear Flannery O’Connor someplace in the background talking about mystery and saying that the Christian dogma is good because it preserves a sense of mystery in life. And I say, maybe, but only at the expense of credibility and clarity.

Q: I am also thinking of a John Berger essay on mystery and credibility and language. You’re explaining to us that if we want to know your beliefs, we can ask you your beliefs but not the stories because they are aesthetic objects.

Ford: That’s exactly right.

Q: You once said that Independence Day is mainly about people wanting to find shelter, people wanting to find shelter from something. This line reminds me of the famous Bob Dylan song, “Shelter from the Storm.” But I wonder if there is shelter from the storm? Or do we live in a postmodern world where such shelter is just no longer plausible?

Ford: Well, we certainly live in a postmodern world, and it certainly does make traditional shelter a little bit harder to persuade ourselves about when we’re constantly being battered by having all our institutions—verbal institutions, intellectual ones, previously thought innocent ones—deconstructed (often, I would say, to useful ends). You could say that shelter is a concept of the nation-state writ small, a place where we can go and be protected. But I don’t think many of us who think about these issues very much believe that there is really much of a place where we can seek and find protection anymore—only, alas, we still have a need for it. I think that one of the strong forces that’s made the Christian right an ascendant force in this country is because it has perfected a kind of lingo that makes people feel protected—at the cost of plausibility, of course. I still prefer the consolations of art—even with Auden’s disclaimer for it.

Q: The Christian right exploits fear to do that?

Ford: Well of course, but no more these days than Christianity has ever exploited fear. Fear is Christianity’s principal selling point. It’s the spiritual liquidation sale. I mean, “you’ll burn in hell,” that’s certainly fearsome. What else are they selling? Rectitude? Honesty? Humanity? Accountability? I don’t see it.

Q: What are you suggesting that reading is? Is it, as Robert Frost once put it, a “momentary stay against confusion”?

Ford: Yes, good enough. Have you read Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending? That’s what I mean, fictions are mini-institutions by which our attention is turned away from our own mini-apocalypse and back toward the moral constructs of the palpable world.

Q: But that concept also reminds me of The Purple Rose of Cairo, which is a Woody Allen film that depicts art as a world completely elsewhere. And yet, the viewer, played by Mia Farrow, gets so sucked into the film she is watching that she loses touch with reality.

Ford: I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to write stories like that. I just wish I were a better writer, so that the things that being a writer has taught me could somehow be, through the gesture of writing a story, extended to the reader.

Q: What are some questions that you wish people might ask about your work in interviews like this one, but they never do?

Ford: Truthfully, I wish people who read my books didn’t have any questions at all—that all they want to say is congratulations.

But, seriously, I don’t think in those terms. People ask questions of novelists because there are things people want to know from us. Often they’re similar things. And I don’t mind answering them. I don’t much wish readers would ask questions that pertain to the arcana of writing novels. The answers, even if they could be worked out, would probably be boring if you told the truth. People ask questions, I think, because they sense that there’s something magical about literature. And what they want to do (and this can be inspired by skepticism or by a genuine sense of wonder) is reconcile the most obvious incongruities that literature contains or embodies: namely, how can a schlub like this write a book that absolutely transports me. If the readers are skeptical then they want to pick the process apart and find where the phoniness is—that the book’s not as good as it seemed, which makes them feel superior and that their certainties are well-founded. But if they’re wondrous, then they want to hold in their minds the two sides of the incongruity and revel that such a thing could be possible. I’m okay with both. I am a schlub, and I’ve written books that have now and then transported a reader or two. Believe me, it’s a mystery to me, too. But for many readers, just drawing near to that unlikeliness—such as by talking to me—can be exhilarating. I mean, I think it’s exhilarating, too—the notion that the habit of art can produce precious metal by starting out with only base material. Thoreau said a writer was a person who, having nothing to do, finds something to do. That says it best, and preserves the mystery.

Q: Speaking of real mysteries: Who will win the 2008 World Series, and who will be the next President?

Ford: I hate predictions like this. It’s like wanting to know if your girlfriend’s going to say yes, when life is actually all about what it’ll take to get her to say anything at all.