Richard Ford's real America

INTERVIEW:Richard Ford's 'Canada', despite its name, might just be the elusive great American novel. He talks to EILEEN BATTERSBYabout his preoccupation with emotion and the relentless pursuit of truth

IT ALL BEGINS in a haze. There are a few figures standing about, men chatting in the mid-afternoon brightness. I feel like an intruder hovering on the sidelines, watching an event unfolding. But then the men move away and, suddenly, it’s my turn to speak with the American writer Richard Ford about his new novel, Canada, and to tell him that it is quite something; this is a book so good that I don’t know what to say that won’t sound trite.

He makes it at once seem very easy and supremely difficult; the affable, unpredictable Ford smiles his strange, knowing smile – well aware that he has written a masterpiece, but smart enough to merely shrug benevolently before unleashing the full abundance of his southern courtesy. Ford has often described how he “cut loose” from the south and infiltrated the midwest “to get closer to the real America”, but he remains very southern and it is that natural ease and languor that shapes his long, rhythmic sentences and his inspired use of repetition in the utterances he crafts when writing his authentically American language.

Because that is what he does; he articulates America in a way that no one else has managed. He alone has caught the comedy, the sorrow, the regrets and the humanity. He is also a tricky kind of guy, the consummate observer; a loner who enjoys making raids on cities and people before then retreating into the solitude of rural Montana, or wherever it is he happens to be currently living.

At present, it is Maine. “I like the light and the landscape, all that water and the silence. It’s good, the silence.” He is friendly and detached, as striking looking as ever and still mildly eerie, a bit menacing, the obsessive truth-teller possessed of sharp reflexes and an even quicker mind, countered by that wailing Mississippi drawl. No fool and, at almost 68, he retains a strong essence of his younger, driven self.

Richard Ford set out to become the great American writer into whom he has undoubtedly matured. He applied himself to his art as if it were an ordained vocation and, for him, it is. Simplicity and the ordinary are his tools. He is drawn to the small lives of human beings, “the real stuff”. His style of writing is the literary equivalent of method acting; slow, deliberate, rich in telling gestures. His characters sound like ordinary humans, not novelists, endeavouring to make sense of life.

How long did it take to write Canada? “Two years – no, 20, a long time. I began it and then set it aside. It had 20 years of planning. I’m a great returner to . . . I believe in having a second look. Things take time.” He understands cohesion as well as the prevailing importance of a variation on a theme: Canada more than glances back to his short novel Wildlife (1990) and, before that, to the magnificent story Great Falls, which was initially published in Granta in 1987 and later appeared in Rock Springs (1988), among the finest fiction collections of the 20th century. Ford’s narrators recall the bewildered boys they once were. Memory is a force in his fiction and nowhere has even he used it as well as in his unsettling, desperately sad and bleakly funny new book.

Yet even with the Frank Bascombe trilogy – The Sportswriter (1985), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006), his account of a modern American Odysseus initially traumatised by, and subsequently reconciled with, life through experience – already regarded as classics, and so many stories comprising a majestic body of work that culminates in this new wonder, Ford is not complacent. All the hunger he needs for writing is still as real as it was in 1988, when I first interviewed him.

Back then he dressed in suits and could already calmly reflect: “I was 40 years old before anyone started reading my books, when suddenly everyone liked me . . . so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what success means, and it’s not everything.” Fast forward 24 years and it is still true – Ford remains most concerned with winning a private artistic battle with himself as he strives for the level of truth with which his fiction is concerned.

His natural restlessness will prevent him from becoming complacent, and he has always been more alert to criticism than to praise, probably because praise is too easy.

“Publishing News in the States said that this book was about nothing,” he says in a neutral voice. What do I think? Nonsensical, never mind unfair, Canada is about everything that matters, the first and most fundamental thing that anyone learns in life – trust in the normal. Dell, the narrator, remarks shortly after the arrest of his parents for bank robbery: “It was what I said already: things were happening around me. My part was to find a way to be normal. Children know normal better than anyone.”

Therein lays the genius of Canada and perhaps of Ford himself; he understands parents and children so well because he has never forgotten what it was like to be a child, an only one, at that. Dell represents any child who has ever endured the crossfire of a doomed marriage. But Ford counters: “I was happy, I was loved. I’m sure of that. My father died when I was 16 and I was very close to my mother.”

He has no children, a decision he took a lifetime ago with his wife Kristina, whom he married in 1968. They are still married and Ford says: “I owe my writing, and everything, to having married the right woman.” All of his books are dedicated to her.

As a boy, Dell watched the faces of his parents, as did another damaged Ford narrator, Joe Brinson in Wildlife. Ford sees the year 1960 as pivotal in US history. But politics and social change, although evident in his work, particularly as a backdrop to the trilogy – with The Lay of the Land offering pretty much his views on the state of the Union – are not central preoccupations. Emotion concerns him most intensely. All of his books are about emotion, mainly fear and regret as rooted in the tiny struggles of daily life as a stalemated limbo, best explained by one of the characters in Wildlife as “. . . the place where nobody wants to be. It’s the middle where you can’t feel the sides and nothing happens.”

Looking back over 50 years, Dell attempts to make sense of his own feelings, as well as of what took place in the lead-up to and aftermath of the foolhardy, life-changing robbery. His father, greatly taken with Bonnie and Clyde, had always gloried in the idea of robbing a bank; his flawed logic reasoned that only the bank got hurt. For Dell’s mother, desperate for something different from the straitjacket she was living in, the robbery was a symbolic gesture.

Ford has sympathy for his characters; the father, Bev Parsons, is no demon and always has a kind, if invariably distracted, word for his children. He is a southerner and makes the most of all the romance that his origins may secure in the harsher environs of the midwest. He is also a foil to his tiny, deeply dissatisfied wife, his fantasies bizarrely balancing her fury.

Ford recalls that the first book Kristina ever gave him was a collection of short stories by the southern writer Peter Taylor; it figures. The first writer Ford ever saw was Eudora Welty. He was only nine years old and she was famous. His first influences, southern literary giants “Faulkner, Welty and just about anyone from the south”.

And it does show in his somewhat operatic first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976). Then Frank O’Connor became important, as did Harold Pinter – “for the way his dialogue develops in the way real conversation does” – and John Cheever, a presence throughout Women and Men (1997) and, most particularly, in A Multitude of Sins (2001) a collection that includes Reunion, his homage to Cheever. Influence would yield to mentorship and, in midwesterner William “Bill” Maxwell, Ford saw something that also resounded within him. The narrator of So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) is also looking back from age to youth but he has lived with remorse for an unkindly act of denying a former friend when that boy’s father committed murder.

Dell is different, more passive and far more damaged. “He has to make sense of what happened,” says Ford. “We all have to make sense of the things that happen.” He is not trying to be mysterious. About the most shocking revelation Ford makes – and it is marginal shock, at that – is referring to having “been in trouble with the law” when he was a teenager, “for fighting and stealing, stuff like that”. He laughs out loud and rolls his eyes.

A life changes in an instant; a second too soon, or too late, and two cars collide. But Ford is not interested in fate. “No, for me, it’s all about choice. We make the decisions – we take risks and just toss everything away, mess up love, live badly.” For Dell it is even worse – he saw his parents throw their lives, and his, away.

The first part of the book is unforgettable through a combination of the characterisation of the parents and Dell’s despairing analysis of events. Then Ford does the impossible – he writes a second part that is equally memorable, in which the passive Dell is drawn into a horrific experience, with brilliantly well-drawn characters. The brief, final section reunites Dell with his dying sister. It is superbly moving. Dell is a victim, but also a survivor. “Well, I’m an optimist,” says Ford, that glint of benign menace dancing in his small bright blue eyes. So how about the title? “Well, there were objections, but I like Canada – the country – as well as the word for a title.”

After all, no one ever said that the great American novel had to be called America. And it looks like it’s not.