Cul-de-Sac

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford on his latest Frank Bascombe book and sex in the suburbs.

by Joey Rubin


November 24, 2006

The only way you can write about New Jersey," Richard Ford said in 1996, "is to take conventional wisdom about New Jersey, which is that it's a kind of an unappetizing place, and reverse it, actually write . . . an homage to New Jersey." Born and raised in the Deep South, Ford has made his name by writing two such books: The Sportswriter (1986) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day (1995). Set in the unremarkable housing developments of the fictional New Jersey suburb Haddam, they've done little to upend New Jersey's unsavory reputation. Instead, they've introduced hapless Everyman Frank Bascombe into the pantheon of great literary antiheroes.
    A fiction writer-turned-sportswriter-turned-realtor, Frank does his best to make sense of, and find some happiness in, his bland surroundings. His mundane adventures in and around Haddam include aimless driving around the interstate, eating alone and placing distracted phone calls to wives, girlfriends and children. But if he's comfortable living a predictable life (he does seem at ease with the notion that "with enough time, American civilization will make the Midwest of anyplace — New York included"), he is not comfortable living it unexamined.
    Ford's latest Frank Bascombe narrative, The Lay of The Land, takes place over Thanksgiving weekend in the year 2000. Frank, now fifty-five, is living on the Jersey Shore, has been abandoned by a second wife and is being treated for prostate cancer. Nerve spoke to Ford about how people sustain long-term relationships when confronted with mediocrity and dullness. — Joey Rubin

Frank's sex drive in this book seems to have been hampered a bit by age and illness.
I've written lots of stories in which sex and sexuality, in a lot of contexts, are right in the middle of the crosshairs. But I think this must be the book about things that, in the context of one's long life coming toward its end, seem more important.

You mean he's not looking for sex, he's looking for love — or, for meaning in love?
Well, I'm not very comfortable with the notion of finding meaning in love. I'm not very comfortable with the notion of finding meaning in anything. I'll quote something [Canadian writer] Mavis Gallant said to me: "If we knew what went on between women and men, we wouldn't need literature."

In other words, we need literature badly.
It's an intensely complex relationship that we have with the other, with someone we love. And one of the reasons we do it so badly, for the most part, is that we don't really accommodate ourselves to its complexity. And the reason we don't usually accommodate ourselves to its complexities is that we're mostly looking out for ourselves and pretending we are looking out for someone else. In other words, we're narcissistic.

Is Frank narcissistic? He says at one point, "Me, me, me, me. Why does it have to be about me? That's the part of life that makes you want to end it." And yet here he is, narrating three novels.
Well, most of the time when you're unhappy, you're unhappy because of something you yourself have done, not because of something being done to you by the person who loves you. I think [Frank] is quite aware that one of the pitfalls of intimacy and human relations with others is narcissism.

Is that something you've found in your own experience, having been married to one woman since you were young?
Yeah, I think that's a principal issue of my life, insofar as I have spent my whole life with one person. My wife and I have lived apart for periods of time for reasons that were entirely about her career and my work and writing life; we knew we were tempting fate when we did it. Sometimes people just don't have the imagination required to bring it together in that strong a way, but we did it nonetheless, and at this point we've been married thirty-eight years. So we got it together.

But the paradigm in one's life with another is "union," and what exactly that means I can only think is "two becoming one." Unfortunately, you have old Emerson saying at the same time that "there is a universal distance between us all which we cannot surmount." And therein is the problem. [laughter] And that's why it becomes the subject for imaginative literature, because only by imaginative gestures can we make those two things reconcile.

Why do you think so many couples these days don't hold it together?
I put it all under the umbrella word of "imagination." They operate with insufficient imagination, and operate too closely, hewing to the line of conventional wisdom or received notions about why things happen and who's at fault when they do. Such as, "Well, if he fucks her, that's the end of me, by God. I'm down the road." And then all of a sudden, he fucks her. Now, what are you going to do about it? Are you going make up your own mind based on how you feel? Or are you just going to say, "Well, I drew that line in the sand, and I'm going to stay behind it"? That strikes me as the reason people don't stay together — not because they don't love each other.

So, imaginative faculty — both looking inside yourself and forging your own path?
Yeah, I think forging your own path, as platitudinous as it seems, is actually quite hard to do, because you're being bombarded all the time by very persuasive and ingenious methods for trying to persuade you to do things other than what are in your interests.

You mean in terms of society giving you those signals?
Yes. Society and the culture. Matthew Arnold said, "Culture is all about ideas of perfection." I think that Arnold would be spinning in his grave if he were studying our culture. It certainly is not! It's about mediocrity, by and large. We're simply pelted with it, day in and day out, on the TV and with our public officials — with people we are meant to admire. We see them doing unbelievably unscrupulous if not morally mediocre things.

Suburbia is often seen as a symbol of that mediocrity. Yet Frank seems to be pretty happy in that milieu, living his conventional life.
Well, nobody ever said these things were going to be completely consistent. [laughs] As for Frank living a rather conventional, suburban life, I think he fully realizes that he swung down a couple of knots on the rope of aspiration quite a long time ago, and what he's trying to do is find some way to respect it, try to find some language for affirmation with what he's chosen.

So his anger throughout the novel — getting in a bar fight, tussling with his son, etc. — is not a reaction to suburban malaise or a statement on suburban male aggression?
I attribute that to the condition he finds himself in. He's basically kind of pissed off. He's sick. His wife has left him again. His kids are coming to thwart him. Against all of his best efforts he's entering into this season of woe — this season between Thanksgiving and Christmas — suddenly beset by the very kinds of problems that he thought he'd resolved.

So it's more of the fact that we caught him on a shitty weekend, not that he's become an angry old man?
We've caught the country on a shitty weekend.

Frank also talks about difficulties with being friends with men. He says at one point, "Two male hugs in one morning is a lot." Do you find that heterosexual relationships between men in our society are confusing?
People are always embracing him in one way or another, with it not working out right. He wants to run out the door when it happens. I'm not really like that myself. But fortuitously, I found myself writing that line for him, and it seemed so right for him that when I left it in, it became part of who he was, and I just decided I liked it.

I like that this book touches on so many different types of relationships like that.
Somebody just sent me a review of my book in Playboy, which I don't read, but my wife did. So she snipped the review out, and I was then free to look through Playboy, which I hadn't done in thirty-five years. Now there's a little magazine about relationships!

I haven't read many Playboys from thirty years ago, but I get the impression that it has changed a great deal.
You would have the wrong impression about that. I did, and it hasn't.  n°

©2006 Joey Rubin and Nerve.com