Ford perfect

US writers have been sending out warning shots to Europe, particularly Britain, for a long time. It could be argued that Henry James arrived in England not only because he was obsessed with the place, but because he liked the idea of bringing the English, never mind the American novel, on to its next stage of development. Fitzgerald and Hemingway not only inspired their own generation, they set the scene for what was to become a 20th-century American literary take-over, particularly of the short story and novel.

And while Saul Bellow inaugurated the US post-war literary revival with an urgent profundity all his own, the generation coming after him has added some additional rules. Raymond Carver pioneered a new style of exclusively American realism, untouched by Europe, untouched by religion, but it took Richard Ford to elevate this peculiarly intense, personal voice to new levels of stark, graceful, lambent eloquence. He is committed to establishing a wholly American literary language.

In 1986 Ford, from Jackson, Mississippi, achieved the near impossible on the publication of his third book, The Sportswriter. Here was a Big American Novel which not only moved US critics and readers alike, it also won over the always wary British reviewers. The story of narrator Frank Bascombe, sportswriter, failed husband and bereaved father, triumphed on its UK publication. Bascombe, rooted in his own chaos, is a conversational if shell-shocked Everyman, ordinary and bewildered by the mess he has made of his life.

Standing in a cemetery on Good Friday morning, he waits in the mist for his ex-wife and wonders about the events that have led to this. The narrative that unfolds is a quiet, masterful exploration of alienation. Ford examines the private world of male doubts and fears and, above all, the contradictory confusion caused by wanting uncomplicated freedom while also craving stifling security. That book struck - and strikes - so many chords with so many readers it became an instant classic.

Ford had already served his apprenticeship. His first novel A Piece of My Heart (1976), an operatic and densely plotted slice of Southern Gothic about two men, one pursuing a woman, the other hunting for himself, indicated the vicious humour which would further assert itself in his work - and has. It was followed by The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), a thriller set in Mexico and marked by echoes of Greene.

The publication of Rock Springs, in 1988, confirmed that Ford was as fine a short story writer as he is a novelist. It is a very strong collection of 10 strong stories. Search and survival provide the themes as a convincing cast of marginalised walking wounded attempt to find something, anything, that small bit better. Even at their most helpless these are characters with an emerging sense of self - as the narrator of the title story asks, as he selects his next stolen car, " . . . what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come down on him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?"

INCREASINGLY central to Ford's fiction is a quest for self-understanding and a need to place the present in the context of the past. Possibly his most beautiful work to date is the gentle elegy Wildlife (1991) in which narrator Joe Brinson looks back on an event which changed his childhood and helped determine the man he is - his mother's affair.

Within a year of that book, Ford had also given ample evidence of his critical intelligence through his shrewdly perceptive editing of The Granta Book of the American Short Story. By drawing his selection of 43 short stories from the immediate post-war period, he presented as near complete a portrait as is possible of the US short story, and his grasp of US literary trends. In 1998 he applied the same insights when choosing The Granta Book of the American Long Story, a volume made even more valuable by Ford's accompanying essay "Why Not A Novella?" But before that there were two exciting works of fiction.

He decided to take up the story of Frank Bascombe, now some seven years on, in Independence Day, the sequel to The Sports- writer. Still obsessed with his ex-wife, referred to throughout The Sportswriter as "X", but now named Ann, the rootless Frank appears to have wised up and has changed jobs having exchanged sports journalism and dreams of writing for a "safer" career in real estate. Frank continues his stalemated personal odyssey and is a walking emotional vacuum, if a more watchful observer. The novel is hilarious, and has some brilliant characterisation, particularly in the disappointed Ann, ever protecting the reader from the dangerously engaging narrator: "Everything's in quotes with you Frank. Nothing's really solid. Every time I talk to you I feel like everything's being written by you. Even my lines. That's awful. Isn't it. Or sad."

At the heart of the book, however, is the heartbreakingly-well described relationship Frank has with his son Paul. It is Ford's vision of America. It is also his portrait of a modern man in chaos.

Women with Men (1997) a startling trio of stories about male weakness, includes "Jealous", in which the narrator looks back on his 17-year-old self and recalls "that scary feeling you have that you're suffocating and your life is running out - fast, fast . . . and you have to do something to save yourself, but you can't". Elsewhere Martin Austin arrives in Paris and decides he may be about to begin an affair with a woman he meets. Not that things are bad back home in Illinois - ". . . he wasn't looking for a better life. He wasn't looking for anything." In the third story, a one-book writer has come to Paris to meet his translator. His wife has left him but he does have a travelling companion, the memorable Helen who wants to have fun and is dying. The three stories juggle inertia and urgency with an adroit knowing.

Last year Richard Ford published a valuable selection of the best of Chekov. Ever the reader, ever the writer, Ford is considered among the best in the world. It is not too difficult to see why.

Richard Ford will be reading a new short story at Kilkenny Ormonde Hotel on Saturday, August 19th, at 6 p.m.