Martin Austin is in Paris on a business trip and reckons he may be about to begin an affair with a woman he meets there. Not that he is particularly unhappy with his situation back home in Illinois. "He was not the conventionally desperate man on the way out of a marriage that had grown tiresome . . . he wasn't looking for a better life. He wasn't looking for anything." People taking halfhearted but dangerous risks is the central theme of the superb trio of stories in Richard Ford's heartbreakingly bleak Women With Men, which again confirms his genius for chronicling the inexactness and haphazardness of life, for exploring sentiment without sentimentality and for making the banal seem profound.
"Mmm, well I'm not looking for profound . . . I'm interested in the way small things just change a life and the fact that people can mess up everything for themselves and for others, particularly others," says Ford, with that look of empathic wonder which accompanies many of his responses. "People are constantly risking everything they have. And you know, I think there is this fact that we love badly."
He is affable, funny, edgy yet relaxed; he is also puzzling, unpredictable, watchful, engaging and also a bit scary, and slightly unreal. "The only me I can be is the person I am," he says mildly.
He is protective of his work, for all the admiring reviews he receives - he seems more aware of the hostile ones; "they [his books] get kicked around a lot." Ford, in contrast to the touchy gunslinger image of him invented by journalists, is also an extremely astute, generous reader of other writers.
This fair-mindedness is an aspect of that critical intelligence which shaped The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992), which he edited. He did not include his own work - despite the fact that Rock Springs (1988) is one of the finest collections of short stories published in America, or anywhere else, since the second World War. An obsessive who exudes that same reflective restlessness which marks so many of his characters, he agrees that his stories are draining yet hopeful, and cheerfully announces, with a broad, cartoon smile: "I'm an optimist."
Most of all, Ford the obsessive writer has the air of a truth-teller. If he had to shoot you, he'd be nice about it, and would also do a good job. Since the publication of his third novel, The Sportswriter (1985), the story of Frank Bascombe, a modern American Everyman traumatised by his divorce and drifting through a palpable emotional malaise, Richard Ford has been famous. He has taken a style of American realism believed to have been pioneered by the late Raymond Carver and has elevated it to new levels of stark, graceful eloquence.
Central to much of his work is the quest for self-understanding. Many of his narrators revisit the past and pinpoint a moment of awakening. Thus Joe Brinson in Wildlife (1990) recalling an affair his mother had when he was a boy, or Lawrence looking back on his then 17-year-old self in "Jealous" - the only one of the three new stories told in the first person - and remembering "that scary feeling you have that you're suffocating and your life is running out . . . and you have to do something to save yourself, but you can't".
Two years ago, the sequel to The Sportswriter, Independence Day (1985) appeared. Frank the one-book author has given up sports writing and is now selling real estate. Still mourning his marriage, he has nevertheless pulled himself together and is thinking a lot and clearly. "A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon," observes this wised-up, shrewder, more settled version of Bascombe. ". . . you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late . . ."
Of most interest to Ford, as he said in 1988 when I first interviewed him, "are the small things of human beings, that's the real stuff". It still is the real stuff. Life appears to be about the business of getting through the present moment.
These new stories are about emotions; all of his books are about emotions. Interestingly, though, the new stories are full of incident. Ford is consciously balancing inertia with urgency, apathy with speed. In "Occidentals", the third of the new stories, Charley Matthews and Helen Carmichael arrive in Paris. Matthews's wife has walked out on him so it seems a good time to come to France and meet the French translator of his only book. While Charley is existing in a self-absorbed state, his companion is determined to have fun. After all, she is in Paris, obviously not in love either, and wants to have a good time. And she is dying.
Helen is a memorable creation, brave and funny and convincing. "I don't believe in eras," she says, "I believe it's all continuous. Now and then. Women and men." One of the several strengths of Independence Day is Ann, Frank's exasperated former wife, known as X in The Sporswriter, but now named. He may be getting to know himself, but she remains the expert. Not only is she the truthteller, she prevents us from being too drawn in by Frank. "Everything's in quotes with you Frank. Nothing's really solid. Everytime I talk to you I feel like everything's being written by you. Even my lines. That's awful. Isn't it? Or sad?"
Committed to establishing a truly American literary language, Ford consistently captures the essence of American speech, whether in his dialogue or monologue sequences, and is equally happy in third- or first-person narrative. "But I think there's a curiosity in the first person. I like that." Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, he has steadily moved away from the South. "The Mid-West is the real America." In fact, only his first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), a heavily-plotted, high-pitched gothic tale about sexual obsession, marked him out as a Southerner. He has made a deliberate move away from the lush, repressed, lyric hysteria of much Southern writing while retaining a graceful Southern rhythm in his prose. "I did cut loose, I got away from the South and closer to America. I hope I have shaken off the loose bits."
Has following one man's life so intimately through two long books made its easier for him to explore lives so fully? "Maybe." Never forcing the reader's sympathy for his characters, Ford stresses his own sympathy for them. "I remember someone saying they wouldn't like to share an elevator with my characters," he says, "but I care about them."