The Elegant Variation: FORD'S WOES

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June 21, 2004

FORD'S WOES

Richard Ford is working on his new novel and having a rough time of it, it seems.

"The one thing that is true about doing this all my life is that I do understand that when things are hard and words are not coming easily to the page and you are having to dig and to figure things out and you think to yourself, `I'm making a dog's breakfast of this', well it's not always the case that you are."
Ford, who lives in Maine in the northeast United States and has been a writer for more than 30 years, claims his "particular genius" is to know how long a book will be once he has worked on it for about a month. He says he has now completed 380 typed pages - "about half" - of The Lay of The Land .

He adds it's a big undertaking but he is not complaining about it.

"It's a little bit like being the manager of a football team - you have to deal with a lot of players who are not only swinging in different directions but also have to be kept heading towards the one goal.

"That part's kind of fun in a way if you can keep from giving into the dread that you are doing it badly."

As we've noted before, we're not huge Ford fans, but it is vaguely reassuring to know that we're not the only ones grappling our way toward the end. Oh, we have no genius for anything but expect to come in at around 400 pages. It's an attention span thing ...

UPDATE: FOTEV Robert Birnbaum - who has (natch) done his own interview with Ford - writes to inform that the link isn't working properly. Since there's no permalink offered by the guys at the Otago Daily Times, here's the whole piece:

Writing novel worth the struggle Richard Ford has written about half of his new novel, The Lay of the Land , and as he tells KEVIN KANE, of NZPA, he is pleased it has been hard going.
Richard Ford's last novel, Independence Day , won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

One of its predecessors, The Sportswriter , was hailed by the critics and picked as one of the best books of 1986.

Ford has also written three other well-received novels, several short story collections and has contributed numerous articles to magazines such as the New Yorker .

Yet, he still struggles with writing.

"The one thing that is true about doing this all my life is that I do understand that when things are hard and words are not coming easily to the page and you are having to dig and to figure things out and you think to yourself, `I'm making a dog's breakfast of this', well it's not always the case that you are."

Ford, who lives in Maine in the northeast United States and has been a writer for more than 30 years, claims his "particular genius" is to know how long a book will be once he has worked on it for about a month. He says he has now completed 380 typed pages - "about half" - of The Lay of The Land .

He adds it's a big undertaking but he is not complaining about it.

"It's a little bit like being the manager of a football team - you have to deal with a lot of players who are not only swinging in different directions but also have to be kept heading towards the one goal.

"That part's kind of fun in a way if you can keep from giving into the dread that you are doing it badly."

He says this dread comes along at the most predictable of times "when things seem to be going smoothly".

"It is also my fear, I guess it is a fear, that when things are going along swimmingly that I'm blithely ignorant of something I'm missing," he chuckles.

The Lay of the Land is the third book in the trilogy - The Sportswriter and Independence Day being the first two - narrated by protagonist/hero Frank Bascombe.

Frank was introduced in The Sportswriter as a 38-year-old who had abandoned a promising writing career to work as a sports reporter for a glossy magazine.

Set in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey, the story took place over the weekend of Easter 1983 and told the story of Frank's attempts to come to terms with the death of his son four years earlier, his divorce and his life in terms both wry and poignant.

Its successor, Independence Day , found Frank back in Haddam but now a real estate salesman who over the course of an Independence Day weekend attempted to rebuild a relationship with his second son on a disastrous trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The Lay of the Land, in common with its predecessors, is set over a holiday weekend, in this case Thanksgiving 2000, 10 months before the events of September 11, 2001 and Ford says it is a book concerned with "permanence".

But the book is also inspired in a way by the events of 9/11.

"The events of that day never occur in The Lay of Land but the book examines what went before and how they might fit into what happened," Ford says.

He says the optimism of his everyman Frank Bascombe, which contrasts with the often bleak portrayals of the possibilities for long-term happiness enjoyed by many of his characters, was deliberate.

"In a way all three of these books are long extenuations of what my wife said to me before I started writing The Sportswriter back in 1982.

"She said `why don't you write about someone who is happy' - and this is the only way I can do it.

"I have equipped this person with a rather indomitable sense of grudging optimism and then placed in his way all kinds of stumbling blocks for which he has to try to imagine an optimistic vocabulary."

Posted at 12:13 AM | Permalink

Comments

I hope Richard's keeping a little saliva in reserve for when the reviews come out.

Posted by: Jimmy Beck | June 21, 2004 at 09:08 AM

To hell with the reviews. I'm hoping he can keep up the incremental quality curve with Bascombe.

Posted by: Ed | June 30, 2004 at 09:42 AM

I'm new here, having just stumbled in by way of a Google search for any available information re: The Lay of the Land...

I garner from an above post that Ford is not the most popular author discussed in the forum, but I wanted to mention that the little preview Ford gave us several weeks ago was, I thought, very good. A little plodding, perhaps - but then I've often heard that criticism w/ regards to Ford's Bascombe novels and I've found it accurate but somewhat unimportant. My foolish two pence.

Posted by: dep | September 24, 2004 at 02:23 PM

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 21, 2004

FORD'S WOES

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

June 21, 2004

FORD'S WOES

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism