Posted Wednesday September 2nd 2009
by James Smith

In the first of an occasional series about authors we admire, Booktrust website editor James Smith tries to explain why he loves Richard Ford's books so much.

How did I first stumble across Richard Ford? It’s hard to remember, but I think I plucked a copy of Wildlife – minus its back cover – out of the ‘damaged’ box of the bookshop I was working in at the time. It had a horrible jacket design, but once I’d got past this I was drawn in by Ford’s visceral prose style – what later became known, thanks to Granta magazine, as ‘dirty realism’, a catch-all phrase that encompassed a lot of American writing at the time.

Later, I tried another, The Ultimate Good Luck: more gritty grittiness. And then. Then I read something extraordinary, and extraordinarily different, like nothing I’d read before; a novel called The Sportswriter, the first of what eventually became a trilogy of books about a New Jersey man by the name of Frank Bascombe.

Here was the life of an ‘ordinary’ suburban man, struggling with work, bereavement and the collapse of his marriage, told in the most beautiful, tragic and yet unpatronising way. For me, the heartbreaking element of these books is Frank’s openness and an almost relentless positivity in spite of his struggles. Frank’s a thinker (probably an over-thinker), but his philosophising resonates with the reader and draws us into his life.

To spend so much time with one character requires that his or her voice rings true. Ford has written of his characters that ‘I want them first to be radiant in verbal and intellectual particularity … to revel in being specifically this man, this woman …’ He has Bascomble down pat (which I guess he should after spending all those years with him).

Here is Frank describing his girlfriend Vicki Arcenault in The Sportswriter: ‘a sweet, saucy little black-hair with a delicate width of cheekbone, a broad Texas accent and a matter-of-factness with her raptures that can make a man like me cry out in the night for longing.’ Here he is in what he calls the Permanent Period of his life (in The Lay of the Land, the third book in the trilogy): ‘the refugees’ sad plight in Gaza, the hole in the polar ice cap … seemed dire, it’s true, but was frankly tolerable from my end of the telescope.’ Two pieces of honesty, almost embarrassing in their candour.

And here is the opening to the second book, Independence Day: ‘In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems’ – a perfect example of what Jonathan Raban has called Ford’s ‘long, sinuous, lavishly articulate sentences.’

Ford is often asked whether Bascombe was intended to be an ‘everyman’ – struggling with divorce, a troubled relationship with his son, a cancer scare – but he has said that that was never his intention: ‘Not only would I have no idea how to go about writing such a full-service literary incarnation, I’m also sure I’d find the whole business to be not much fun in the doing.’

There won’t be any more novels about Frank ('It's too hard; it breaks my ass to do it,’ Ford said in 2006), but it is likely that there will be more short stories, and it is this aspect of Ford’s writing that has given me equal, if not greater, pleasure than his longer fiction. In a land renowned for its short story writers, Ford is an acknowledged master. I urge you first to read A Multitude of Sins and then Women and Men, both of which contain razor-sharp dissections of relationships. Then go back to Rock Springs and read his earlier stories.

When you’re done with those, work your way through Granta’s two anthologies of American short stories, edited, and introduced by, yes, you’ve guessed it – Richard Ford.

Richard Ford’s books are published by Bloomsbury.

The Bascombe trilogy is available in one volume from Everyman’s Library.

The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The New Granta Book of the American Short Story are published by, er, Granta.

Pic: jacket detail from The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury)