“The thing about living this way is that you think nothing of driving 2,000 miles to reclaim something you’ve left behind.” Richard Ford is talking, via Zoom, about his recent move from Maine, in the northeastern corner of the USA, where he lived when I last spoke to him in 2020, to the southern city of New Orleans.
He’s a southern boy at heart, born in Jackson, Mississippi, a mere 200 miles from New Orleans – “I go up there just for dinner sometimes” – so really, this represents coming home. “It’s just important to me to have a throughline back to where I started life, because I’ve gotten so far from where I started. And you can begin to think you don’t know where in the hell you are.”
[ Richard Ford: How did we in America ever get to this place?Opens in new window ]
He really has gone far from where he started: Ford is one of the most celebrated of living American novelists, both a bestseller and winner of big prizes. And the book we’re talking about today is a particularly exciting one for Ford fans: Be Mine is the fourth – and final – novel featuring Frank Bascombe, his everyman narrator who has charmed readers since Ford’s breakthrough 1984 novel The Sportswriter. Then came the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006) and the four novellas collected in Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). The pun in the title of the last is an indicator of the humour that runs through the series.
I tell Ford that when I shared a picture of the new book on social media, there was a lot of excitement. Why does he think people like the Frank Bascombe books so much?
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“Other than my genius?” he laughs. “I think it’s probably because of something I admire myself in books that comes from a line of Henry James. ‘No themes are so human as those that reflect out of the confusion of life, the relationship between bliss and bile.’ I think the people who do like the books like them because they’re funny, and they’re funny about really grave things. There’s the old Borscht Belt comedian line: if nothing’s funny, nothing’s serious.”
Well, Be Mine fits that description. The subject matter is ostensibly grim. Frank, now in his 70s, is looking after his 47-year-old son Paul, who is dying – quickly, horribly – from motor neuron disease.
The book charts Frank and Paul’s time together in February 2020, just as a new virus is beginning to threaten the world. But it is a funny book, with Frank and Paul’s dialogue – decades of love contained within – reading at times like a comedy double-act.
I wrote this book through the worst of the pandemic, and it was a big tincture of melancholy of not using my life fully enough
“The two faces of tragedy and comedy are always joined, for me,” says Ford. “It wasn’t always important to me. But as I got on with life, and realised I was trying to write great books, in those [other] great books I cared about was tragedy and comedy joined.”
And was he as excited to get back to Frank’s world as his readers seem to be? After a very long pause, Ford says, “Yes. I wrote this book through the worst of the pandemic, and it was a big tincture of melancholy of not using my life fully enough, even though I was using my life probably as fully as I knew how. I was really glad to get to do it. [But] ‘excitement’ is probably ... you know, being a Protestant, I may never have been excited about anything.”
He goes on. “But at my age, you want to write a book that will be useful to the readership. I felt honoured to get to try to do it again, to write another useful book, useful in all the ways that literature can be useful, by delighting people, by saying something to them about something they cared about that they hadn’t heard before, by writing a book in which they could perhaps see their own frailties acknowledged and surpassed.”
In the book Frank seems trapped between the present of his experience with Paul’s illness and memories of the past. Does Ford reflect more on the past as he gets older?
“No,” he says immediately. “No, I work at not doing it! It’s very much my programme to be in the present looking at the future. It’s not as easy as it used to be!” he adds, breaking down into laughter as he speaks.
[ Richard Ford: ‘In America no one will stay at home’Opens in new window ]
What about happiness? The book opens and closes with Frank’s reflections on happiness. Does Ford agree with the research that says that, after a dip in midlife, happiness rises again as we enter old age?
“No,” he says quickly, laughing again. “I haven’t noticed myself being at 79 a lot happier. I’m hoping someone will pipe that ether into my room soon. But I don’t think any of those little [rules] apply when you have the pandemic all around you. But my wife and I were driving down from Montana last month and saw a guy, a big fat truck driver, that had a Donald Duck T-shirt on, and Donald is snarling out into the world. And above it, it says ‘This is my happy face’. So I have four of those T-shirts now.”
As well as Frank and his son, Be Mine also features the return of minor characters beloved of Ford’s readers, such as Mike Mahoney, a Tibetan-American who changed his name to “something more Irish”.
If someone comes up to me and says, ‘I read your book, it wasn’t worth a s**t’ – that would make me unhappy. But then that doesn’t usually happen in America, where people don’t read much
“I so wanted Mike in this book,” says Ford. “For practical reasons, because he’s someone who makes me so happy. And I also wanted to be a white man writing about an Asian man. I wanted to try to appropriate that character in a way some people would find offensive. I just want to kind of thumb my nose at all that stuff. Who’s to say, after all, that an outsider’s view isn’t useful about somebody who you think you’d have no right to write about? So I took delight, not just from the transgressive standpoint, but delight in having Mike on the page, because he’s funny and he makes me laugh.”
In fact, says Ford, the pleasure for him is all in the writing of the book, rather than the responses from readers. “It’s all in the doing for me. I’m constantly thinking to myself, is this working the way I need it to work? Or is my delight something the reader will never share?
“And once it leaves the house and it’s out in the world, you can certainly cut me to the quick by saying something mean to me. If someone comes up to me and says, ‘I read your book, it wasn’t worth a s**t’ – that would make me unhappy. But then that doesn’t usually happen in America, where people don’t read much.” And Ford adds – a common statement by experienced authors – that he doesn’t read reviews.
John Banville, I say, commented that it doesn’t matter if you don’t read reviews, because your friends will show you the worst ones anyway. “Not if they want to stay my friend,” says Ford. “I’ve cut some people out of my life without a word because they felt the need to tell me about a bad review.” Why do they do that? “Because they’re stupid!”
I’m happy to say that if it hadn’t been for Updike, I probably would never have had the temerity to think that I could write connected books
By the way, I add – though I know Ford would have no interest in such low things – he has now outdone John Updike, who wrote four novels and one novella in his Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom series.
“Well, John was a great writer and I adored him, and I would never be in the same sentence as him, but maybe that’s averring that size matters.” He laughs. “But he knew that I was writing a series of books that were connected. And he talked to me as a colleague. He never said ‘These are great books’. Or ‘I know you wouldn’t have written these books if I hadn’t written the Rabbit books’. We just talked. But I’m happy to say that if it hadn’t been for Updike, I probably would never have had the temerity to think that I could write connected books.”
What is Ford reading now for pleasure? “Well I’m reading Fintan [O’Toole]’s book [We Don’t Know Ourselves] for one thing. Which is immersive and wonderful. And very useful for a non-Irish reader, oh boy. And I’m just about to read Michael Magee’s debut novel [Close to Home]. My wife’s read it. I couldn’t get it out of her hands.” Apt reading, as he tells me he will be in Ireland next month.
I remember that when I last spoke to Ford, he was worried that then-president Donald Trump would use Covid as an excuse to delay the election. And now Trump has gone – but may be coming back.
[ Richard Ford: It is difficult to say something smart about a stupid manOpens in new window ]
“Well, I think he will probably be the Republican nominee [for the 2024 presidential election]. I just don’t think Ron DeSantis has that mass appeal. DeSantis is a really unpleasant man in a standard villainous way. Trump is a destructive buffoon, but he obviously has a certain allure for a large measure of the population.
“But,” he continues, “I’m mostly caught up in the dearth of imagination among the Democrats for not having the gumption to quietly escort President Biden off the stage. It’s just horrible. And he’s got them all convinced that he’s the only Democrat who can beat Trump. Biden and I are the same age and he’s too damn old to be president. He’s not too damn old to be writing a novel ... ”
Who would be a good candidate for the Democrats? “[There’s] a woman in Georgia named Stacey Abrams, a woman of colour and completely our ticket. She knows what she’s doing. If Biden would bounce Kamala Harris and put Stacey Abrams in the ticket with him, I would think the opposite of what I think now. Okay, go ahead, get elected president, have a stroke, die. Okay, fine. Because then we have Stacey Abrams as the president. I think nothing could be better.”
Be Mine will be published by Bloomsbury on June 22nd. Richard Ford will be appearing at the following events: International Literature Festival Dublin on May 27th; Listowel Writers’ Week on June 4th; Belfast Book Festival on June 15th; Festival of Writing & Ideas, Borris on June 16th & 17th; Dalkey Book Festival on June 18th; Hinterland Festival, Kells on June 25th; and Kennys Bookshop, Galway on June 30th.
