A Long Drive Through New Jersey, Taking the Crosses off the Walls

In person, Richard Ford is a comforting and inspiring presence. As a dedicated reader of Ford’s work, I didn’t necessarily expect this to be the case, but I certainly hoped for it to be. After all, Ford’s greatest achievement—the sprawling, quotidian Frank Bascombe trilogy of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land—derives its power from inspiring a nearly hypnotic degree of empathy in the reader for an average, middle-aged New Jerseyan. If it were to turn out that our beloved Frank Bascombe was the creation of a real prick, there is a chance the books’ spell would break, and we would be left with a literary character and universe less hopsitable than the one we knew before.

So the glow of warm appreciation that characterized Ford’s evening event for the Thalia Book Club at Symphony Space on Wednesday night was perhaps partly attributable to relief. The remainder of the positive emotion in the room, however, was the result of a stellar program all around, which featured a poignant extended reading from The Lay of the Land by Good Night and Good Luck’s David Strathairn and a long conversation between Ford and Symphony Space artistic director Isaiah Sheffer. Ford’s responses to questions from both Sheffer and the audience, delivered in a surprisingly strong Mississippi drawl, were casually thoughtful and thoroughly devoid of pretension.

Ford put a fine point on this latter quality in response to a question about possible symbolism wrapped up in the Easter setting of Independence Day. “My whole brief is to give professors nothing to do—to leave nothing uncovered,” said Ford. “As I wrote the book, I kept seeing crosses on the wall and I had to keep ripping them down.”

He expounded further on the larger goals of his craft while answering a question about the reasons behind using the contested presidential election of late 2000 as the backdrop for The Lay of the Land. “One of the moral addresses for all realistic fiction is to make you pay attention to things you have not sufficiently paid attention to,” he said. “I thought the period between voting and December was a time that Americans were asleep. We simply weren’t paying attention.” When Sheffer asked him what Frank Bascombe could have done personally to affect the final outcome of the election, Ford played coy, as he did a few times that evening. “Frank Bacombe is not a human being,” he said, to laughter. “He only does what I tell him to.”

Ford seems to come by these “aw shucks” kind of responses honestly, though at times one simply has to assume he’s purposely withholding information for comic purposes. In reference to Bacombe’s character-defining change of profession between the first and second novel of the series, Ford said, “Well, I rolled the dice and it came up real estate.” As was generally the case though, he expanded on the laugh line until it yielded genuine insight. “When I decided to have him be a real estate agent, I was looking for him to have a vocation,” he said. “When I was a child, when my father would introduce me to people, he would always introduce them by what they did for a living. Its important to know what people do for a living. Also I wanted Frank to have a profession without him having to go back to college... All you have to do is say ‘I am a realtor’ and then you are one.”

Ford’s answers often included similar, deeply quotable material, turning the event into a forum for generously shared original material. On why there is so much driving in his books: “I’m a child of the ’50s, so I think being in the car is the only interior life most of us have.” On death: “I would try not to run scared from it. I would try to treat it as something that’s interesting. I would like to be interested in what’s happening to me.” On the accusation of being negatively “biased against men” in his characterizations: “I just like human beings. I think the greatest moments we have will be moments we share with another person. ... If I turn the hot light on men more often, it’s because I feel they benefit from it.”

The night as a whole did a fantastic job of giving a face and a voice to words that have existed only in readers’ heads for decades. Strathairn’s measured, melancholy reading of the opening of Ford’s reflective final Bascombe volume was eerily close to what I had imagined. He read slowly but brightly, like a person thinking out loud to a genial but undefined other. He chose not to linger over the rather weighty contemplations of death that suffuse this last novel. Rather, in a manner befitting Bascombe’s wide optimistic streak, he found the moments of hope between the lines and conveyed the energy of possibility. To this ear, he seemd the ideal candidate to inhabit the role in the apparently upcoming six-part HBO adaptation of the trilogy, though Ford mentioned Kevin Spacey as his ideal actor. I would never turn my nose up at Spacey of course, but I worry that his affinity for tragedy might drag down a character with a very real possibility of becoming a terrible bore in the wrong hands.

In my mind the lasting memory of the evening came during Ford’s response to one of the final audience questions. A woman had asked him if he ever scrapped entire first drafts and started over, to which he replied, “No”, and, rather incredibly, went on to say he rarely made any significant changes to his manuscript once he had written something down. The woman pressed him, insisting that surely he sometimes simply started over. He held firm, and articulated what seemed to me a lasting approach to writing and life. “When you sit down to write something, it should mean something,” he said. “This is a day of your life that you’re never going to get back. This is a day you should be doing something well. This is something that should be the culmination of a lot thinking you’ve already been doing... I don’t think you should write anything knowing you’re going to throw it away.”