Slipping and Sliding Into the Success Zone

Two months after his novel “Independence Day” became the first book ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN / Faulkner Award, Richard Ford sits in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, appearing relaxed but focused, his ice-gray eyes piercing and clear. Wearing a black open-necked sports shirt and white bucks with no socks, he occupies a large wing chair, from which he occasionally leans forward to make a point.

Ford has a courtly, thoughtful way of speaking, his words inflected with a surgical precision, tinged with the trace of a Mississippi accent and a deliberation that suggests the importance of taking one’s time. All in all, he presents the very image of a successful middle-aged writer, one who, at what seems like the halfway point of his “enterprise,” has as strong an idea of where he’s going as he does of where he’s been.

Yet, he is quick to admit, in some ways such an impression couldn’t be further from the truth. Although he is completing a collection of three novellas and has just signed a contract for a new novel with Alfred A. Knopf, he’s given serious consideration in recent years to walking away from writing altogether.

“Toward the end of finishing ‘Independence Day,’ ” he says, “I thought, if this book doesn’t find some slightly better readership than I have had before, I think I’m young enough that I could probably discover something else to do with my life. Because I do believe that, at 52, when you’ve been writing books for 25 years, you have to have made some kind of progress. There has to be a general sense that, hey, I’m here two-thirds of the way through my life, and this is worthwhile to do.

“And unfortunately, even though the book’s on the bestseller list now, and it’s probably going to have the readership I would have wished for it, I still have that feeling of maybe this is a good time to let go,” adds Ford, who was here recently to promote the paperback edition of the novel.

Sentiments like these may sound odd coming from an author of Ford’s stature, but the truth is that the novelist has never taken a conventional attitude toward the idea of career. Indeed, he tends to eschew the entire concept, declaring, “Writers don’t have careers. All they have is lives.”

Pressed to elaborate, he explains, “What I think is: I’ve done what I’ve done, and if I have a chance to do anything else, I’m going to have to learn something I don’t now know. I don’t mind that. All my life, I’ve written one book and then seen if another book comes. So I don’t project anything, and by not projecting anything, I don’t really have the consoling companionship of a career.”

If, in the course of a quarter-century’s writing, Ford has worked toward any kind of consoling companionship at all, it might be that of his own unpredictability, the way so many of his books don’t seem to resemble each other, except on the most superficial terms. His first novel, “A Piece of My Heart,” (Harper, 1976) operates very much from within the Southern tradition--fittingly so, since the author grew up in Jackson, Miss., across the street from Eudora Welty’s house.

Eager to avoid being pigeon-holed, however, he set his second effort, “The Ultimate Good Luck” (Houghton Mifflin, 1981), among the shadowy expatriate community of Oaxaca, Mexico, writing in a stripped-down, muscular prose that owes little to the legacy of the South. In 1986, he shifted his attention to the suburban middle class with “The Sportswriter” (Vintage); it describes a difficult Easter week in the life of Frank Bascombe, who commutes between his home in the fictitious Haddam, N.J., and a job in New York writing for a sports magazine, as his life collapses slowly from the inside out. That was followed by “Rock Springs” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), a collection of stories, and a short novel, “Wildlife” (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), both of which explore the spare emotional and physical landscapes of rural Montana, where Ford has lived on and off for several years.

Ford, in fact, is something of a nomad; besides Montana he divides his time between Paris, Mississippi and New Orleans, where his wife of 28 years, Kristina--they have no children--is planning director for the city. He has also lived for extended periods in Chicago, Michigan, New Jersey and Irvine (he got a master’s degree at UC Irvine).

“Independence Day” (Knopf, 1995) marks another departure, for this sprawling, occasionally diffuse novel represents the first time Ford has attempted a true sequel, returning specifically to one of his characters and adding another installment to his life. Taking place five years after “The Sportswriter,” it imagines an older, but no wiser, Frank Bascombe--now a Haddam real estate agent--as he tries to find a way out of the isolation of his “Existence Period” and make some connection to the people he has pushed to the periphery of his heart.

These include his 15-year-old son, Paul, recently arrested for shoplifting a box of condoms; his ex-wife, Ann, with whom he entertains fantasies of reconciling; and his girlfriend, Sally Caldwell, who may represent his last, best chance at love. As it slowly unveils over a single Fourth of July weekend, “Independence Day” scrupulously avoids reaching any resolution, except perhaps for Frank’s own determination to move beyond life’s surfaces.

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Writing a sequel can be a tricky business. As Ford says, “I thought if you did that, you’d be maybe diluting yourself, and that sometimes sequels are failures--they don’t get off the ground.” Yet in the end, the author insists, “ ‘Independence Day’ wasn’t spun off in any way. I wanted to write a book about independence, I was interested in setting a book in the Northeast, I thought I wanted to set a book on the Fourth of July. I had all these little pieces of raw stuff, and I spent a long time, a year at least, looking at them and moving them around. And over the period of that time, I kept noticing that a lot of my notes were in a voice that I took to be Frank’s voice.”

With the novel’s success, Ford has found himself compared repeatedly to John Updike, whose character Rabbit Angstrom animated four novels of suburban life before he was ultimately put to rest.

Ford shrugs off such correspondences as inherently meaningless, though he admits that he’s already begun to consider the idea of bringing Frank back. “After writing one book” he suggests, “and having no way to contemplate a second book, to have then written a second book, you would have to be naive to think that you couldn’t contemplate a third. But all I can say about that is that it would have to be at a time when I know something that I don’t know now.”

Meanwhile, Ford has spent some time contemplating his great good fortune, attempting to put it into a context of which he can make sense. “I’m no different,” he says, “from what I was before. I’ve spent my whole writing life seeming like I was in a group of people, who were basically my colleagues and people in my generation--Toby Wolff and Bob Stone and Ray [Carver], and Ann Beattie and Tim O’Brien and John Irving--people about my age. And that’s the way I’ll always feel. I take a great deal of comfort in thinking that I’m just in there with my colleagues pitching, trying to do something for the cause of good writing, and that’s all.”

So what does this mean for “Independence Day”? Where does it fit into the ever-shifting body of Ford’s work? “Next!” the author exclaims, laughing at the suggestion that it should mean anything at all. “It’s what was next. I would have been happy to win the Pulitzer Prize for any of the other books I wrote--I wouldn’t have felt like I didn’t deserve it. Every book is a special book when it comes up in your life, and that’s all I feel. I just thought it was the next book I wrote.”