The Q&A: Richard Ford

Writing is an act of optimism

The Economist, Jun 26th 2012, 9:14 by J.P.O'M  http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/06/qa-richard-ford

RICHARD FORD published his debut novel “A Piece of My Heart” in 1976. But it was not until “The Sportswriter” (1986) that he distinguished himself as an important voice in literary fiction. That book introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, a regular figure in Mr Ford's novels (and according to our critic "among the most fully realised and irritatingly lovable human characters in American fiction"), as well as other marginalised characters on the edge of the American Dream. The two books that followed, “Independence Day” (1995), which earned the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and “Lay of The Land” (2006), completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy.
 
“Canada”, Mr Ford’s seventh novel to date, begins in Montana in 1960 (reviewed by The Economist here). It’s narrated by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot and a schoolteacher. The novel begins when Dell’s parents are sent to jail for robbing a bank, leaving him and his twin sister, Berner, to fend for themselves. The story conveys the way a single foolish decision can destroy a family, and promise a future of destitution and loneliness. The book sees Mr Ford return to a more simple prose style, marking a distinctive shift away from the more elaborate language of the Frank Bascombe novels.
 
In a conversation with The Economist, Mr Ford talks about his memories of Raymond Carver, the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, why writing is an act of optimism and how art makes life.
     
Was it hard to leave behind the voice of Frank Bascombe for this novel?

The challenging part for me was to find a diction that wasn’t just a replication of those other books. As far as getting away from Frank, and the kind of extravagances that Frank’s vocabulary imposes, that wasn’t hard at all. I still love to write notes in Frank’s voice. I thought “The Lay of the Land” was the right point to separate myself from Frank Bascombe.

What’s the significance of the title of this book, “Canada”?

As an American, Canada was a place that attracted me. I felt I could accommodate to Canada extremely well if I had to. I think of Canada as a kind of psychic-moral-spacial-refuge, whereas I think America—even though it’s my home—is challenging all the time. I experience America in many ways. It doesn’t make me want to abandon it, but it certainly does make it a very strange place to live sometimes.      

Would you say you are a positive writer who explores existential failures in your books?

I feel that’s exactly what I am—an optimist, who believes with Sartre that to write about the darker possible things are acts of optimism. What I’m looking for is drama, which occurs when people are at a loss. I try to find a vocabulary which makes those things expressible. In the process it becomes an act of optimism, because it imagines a future in which these things will be understood, and be mediated in some way. Writing for me is always an act of optimism. I probably wouldn’t do it otherwise, no matter how dark things are.

Do you believe art is an escape from the boredom of life?

I would never say boredom. You can make yourself bored sometimes, but I don’t think life itself is boring. For me, it’s a slightly more complex idea. Life is an onslaught. It’s imagination, or art itself, which makes life interesting. Henry James says “art makes life, art makes importance”; that’s kind of what I think life is, this onslaught that you deal with through your imagination. 

You quote Emerson in “Canada” and “Independence Day”. How has he influenced you as a writer?

What Emerson tries to do in his essays is what I try to do in writing novels and stories, which is to take the most complex things I know and the most important things I think I understand, and attempt to say something important that has not been said before. I use Emerson as a model because he works so hard at trying to give a voice that is accessible to things in life that can seem so difficult, important and inaccessible to us.

Why do the characters in your novels travel so much?

I’m interested in how people exhibit who they are, and exhibit their success as human beings, by how they accommodate new moral and spatial settings. That is where drama lies. I’m interested in borders, between someone who is considered marginal and someone who is considered mainstream. I am the child of parents who lived through the Depression, and I was made to learn very early in life that you can easily slide out of the picture, and no longer be a successful citizen, by forces acting on you that you cannot control.

Is this why so many marginal characters turn up in your books?

Well I have sympathy and empathy for them, because I know they are just a blink away from a wholly different and successful life. There is a passage in “Canada” in which Dell talks from his adult perspective about seeing men sitting out in the cold in front of rescue missions. When he sees men in that situation, he says “they’re my father, they’re my father.” 

Could you talk about your relationship with the late Raymond Carver?

We just really took to each other. It started in friendship and affinity, by having parents that came from the same part of America and from the same social environment. It grew to be more of a relationship among writers. I felt like when Ray got famous, that I wasn’t so much in his shadow but I was just his pal, and I was along for the ride. It actually was extremely comfortable to be writing at the same time that he was, because I liked his work, and he seemed to like mine. He encouraged me, and if I was in his shadow I was quite comfortable there. One of the profound losses of my life was that he died when he did, and that I couldn’t go on living in his shadow.   

How do you know when the language is working for you when you are writing?

The degree to which I can hear the language, read it out loud, see it on the page, and know that it has a kind of felicity. I estimate my success by how the words sing to me. Then I have a certain confidence that it’s getting me where I should be going.