KEY POINTS:
Richard Ford isn't writing. At all. In fact, since he finished Lay of the Land, his third novel about Frank Bascombe, the Pulitzer-winning American novelist has been doing just about anything but write.
Ford and his wife, Kristina, spent last winter rebuilding houses in their former home city of New Orleans, still struggling to recover after Hurricane Katrina. Lately, Ford has been watching college basketball tournament finals. He plays squash in New York City. As for writing, he's spent.
"It completely took my measure," says Ford, 63, of Lay of the Land, sitting in the living room of their Riverdale home, surrounded by antiques and furnishings which used to grace their Garden District house in New Orleans. The windows look out on the Hudson River, which glides slowly past.
"At the end of it I was physically ill, and I stayed physically ill for many months."
Tall and rangy, dressed in a purple shirt and Levis, Ford doesn't exactly look ravaged. But that's not quite what he is talking about.
"I really use every resource up that I have in writing a book, so not only do I need to go around and find other things I might write about, but I have to sort of reinstitute the whole vocation."
So lately Ford has been in what he once described in a piece for the New York Times as "a lavish period away from writing".
"People kind of ask me if I would write this or write that. In principle I'd love to, but I don't have the slightest urge to do it. About the most I can do is prepare for my Columbia classes."
In the somewhat workaholic landscape of literary America, where more and more books are being sold at discount stores like Costco and Wal-Mart, where publishers like to have a new hardcover ready when the paperback of an author's previous book hits stores, this is unusual. Some might even argue it's bad for business.
But Ford has never enjoyed or followed the path of a writer as careerist. His first novel was a neo-Faulknerian gothic of sorts, his second could be categorised as a thriller. He started writing stories later in life, in part because his friend Raymond Carver encouraged him.
"I remember showing him my first story," Ford says, thinking back to when he showed Rock Springs to Carver. "And he didn't like it at first. I told him he was wrong. I can still see him, mumbling, smoking a cigarette. 'Maybe so, maybe so'."
When Ford's early work got him pegged as "a Southern writer", he pulled up shop and moved elsewhere, and wrote novels like Wild Life, story collections like Rock Springs. When he was pegged as "a Western writer", along came the first Bascombe novel, The Sportswriter, set in New Jersey, a novel about the suburbs.
"New Jersey, the one place that I wish would claim me, never has," Ford says, laughing, looking out the window across the Hudson at the state, his face screwed up with an ironic expression of longing. "I sit here looking longingly over there, waiting for the call."
Ford can joke about this because New Jersey is not exactly where he's calling from - as Carver would have put it. In addition to New Jersey, Ford has called from California, Chicago, the Mississippi delta, where he bought a plantation house and lived for a time. "I really liked it there," he says, "but I was worried I would stop becoming, which I thought was not a good thing as a young writer."
He has also lived in Paris, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, and still keeps a house in Maine.
Some of this itchy-footedness is just a search for new stimuli, other times it has involved the career followed by Kristina, his wife of 40 years. Ford brings her up often, and during the interview she sits in the kitchen reading Martin Amis' novel, Money. Every one of Ford's books is dedicated to her.
"Kristina has had sort of a wonderful professional life," Ford says. "She has been the head of city planning in Missoula, she has been a professor at New York University, she has been the head of city planning in New Orleans. So we've traipsed around after those jobs."
The result of all this moving - besides a storeroom in Montana Ford doubts they will ever open - is that he has developed a tone, a texture, and a flavour of Americana in his prose that is unexpectedly his own, and deeply American.
Next to John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, there are few Everymen in postwar American fiction who have captured the reading public's imagination quite like Frank Bascombe. Riddled by the early loss of his child, career change, a divorce, and then illness, Bascombe limps into Lay of the Land with a black cackle, and takes a big gulping look at America.
Ford says he has enjoyed being with Frank for so long, but disagrees with the idea that these three books have shown his hero develop in any sort of way. "That's just kind of a trope where some people think our life is continuous. It's probably something we just make up to console ourselves."
In The Lay of the Land, Frank enters what Ford calls the permanent period - where any illusion of personal becoming stops, all forks in the road - or most - have been faced, and what remains is just, as the title suggests, the lay of the land.
The thing Ford is measuring is not just Bascombe's inner life, though, but the landscape of America, too. In Sportswriter, which is set in the 80s, there is the whiff of promise and money of Reagan-era America. In Independence Day, which is set during the 90s, there is a deep nostalgia and pastoral flowering.
The Lay of the Land, which is set during the anxiety-ridden present, lingers on strip malls and SUVs, the fungus of fast-food joints and tacky brand names.
Ford purposely put those details in the novel, he says. "That was one of the great freedoms of writing that book. I've got a pretty retentive memory, and I've got a pretty good ear for the weirdness of language. And I could just get it all in there. All this stuff I haul around with me."
But he says it would be a mistake to assume the novel should be read as a dirge about America's decline (though he clearly has no love for the current President or his policies).
"It's kind of a rhapsody, all that nomenclature. But I don't think it's a rhapsody in a passive way. You could, and many of us do, drive around America, and say, 'Oh, what a mess, look what we've done to the environment, look at what a wreckage this is.'
"If you decide you are going to be more of an affirming agent, one of the things you can do is take responsibility for it. You accept it as something you in some way or other have willed."
In a country like America, where history is felt, as the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy wrote, as a kind of vertigo, this is thinking against the grain. This idea that the country, itself, could be reaching a permanent period, for better or worse.
"You know that great line that was quoted in Kurt Vonnegut's obituary," Ford says, 'You must conclude that they didn't like it here'. My thought is, no, I'm not going to conclude that, because this is what I've got to work with ... and even though there are parts of America I'd rather were different, this is the life I have. I'm not going to continuously, mindlessly, reflexively disparage it."
Nor will he reflexively, mindlessly, keep on with Bascombe. He is done with him, for now and for ever, he claims. "Kristina says this is sort of bad to say this, but I don't know if I have anything interesting to say about the period of life which is ahead of him."
So for now Ford will finish up the master class he instructs at Columbia, go to a few parties, recharge his muse. He has a novel in mind, but he is not rushing to start it. "I've never been 63 before," he says. "I sort of like being 63. I think I'm just going to do that for a while."
* Richard Ford: Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, today at 8pm, Saturday 2pm.
