And I hope we have a better, more wholesome fate than this.
Is all this America’s final fate? I surely hope not. Insofar as the election was stolen by the Republicans, and insofar as the American electorate was sufficiently uninspired as to permit such a close race, and insofar as the two-party system (particularly the feckless Democrats) allowed a man of George Bush’s astonishing incompetence and dishonesty to become the leader of our country-insofar as all these things are true and occurred at the heart of the 2000 election, then that set of events can be viewed as a direct cause of the unthinkable circumstances in Iraq today, the cause of so much loss of innocent life, and the cause of America’s near-obliterated role as a potential force for good in world affairs. Do you feel that election set America’s fate? You set that book at the time of the disputed first Bush presidential election. Some things just don’t need to be done twice-especially since I feel like I did it right the first time. But I can’t imagine another such undertaking as The Lay of the Land. More than I can’t imagine myself writing such a long novel again (and I can’t), I neither can imagine wanting to write anything that would ‘work on a reader’ with anything like the same intense force-length, complexity, general largeness. And it requires a commensurate (if not exactly equal) devotion from its readership. The Lay of the Land was, for me, a big effort and, as efforts go, entirely singular. I still feel that way, possibly even more that way. When The Lay of the Land was completed you suggested you would never write another long novel. Richard Ford now lives in Maine, with his wife of thirty-nine years, Kristina Ford. After two more collections of stories, Women with Men and A Multitude of Sins, the trilogy of Bascombe novels was completed by The Lay of the Land in 2006.
He followed The Sportswriter with a short novel, Wildlife, and then with another Frank Bascombe novel, Independence Day, the only novel to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. He has edited two anthologies, The Granta Book of the American Short Story, and The Granta Book of the American Long Story, which are not only wonderful primers in the art, but also a good guide to the rigour and generosity that inform his writing. His was an indelible fictional voice: troubled, eloquent and stubborn in its hope.įord has continued to write stories, and many of the best of them have appeared in these pages. The Sportswriter introduced the character Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist, who, after his son had died and his marriage ended, had moved from the south of America to take jobs covering baseball and football in New Jersey. If magazines could be said to have characters or souls (or even consciences) Ford and Carver did as much to shape those things in Granta as anyone.Ī couple of years after ‘Dirty Realism’ appeared, Richard Ford wrote The Sportswriter, the novel that made sure that subsequently all of his writing would be in print. Neither had sold in any numbers and when Ford’s Granta story ‘Rock Springs’ came out neither was in print.Īlongside Ford in that ‘Dirty Realism’ issue were other writers who seemed, at least for the purposes of selling literary magazines, to share a similar take on the world, in particular Raymond Carver. At that time, Ford, who was born in Jackson, Mississippi, was about to turn forty and had published two novels, A Piece of My Heart, and The Ultimate Good Luck.
The first story that Richard Ford wrote for Granta appeared in the eighth issue of the magazine, ‘Dirty Realism’, in 1983.
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