Richard Ford is all booked up

Nov. 15--Novelist Richard Ford, feeling tapped out in the 1980s, took up a challenge posed by his wife, Kristina. "Why don't you write about somebody who's happy?" she suggested. "You haven't done that before."

Thus, from Ford's high forehead sprang Frank Bascombe, sportswriter turned New Jersey real-estate salesman, husband and ex-husband, father of three children (one deceased), reflective seeker.

Bascombe debuted in The Sportswriter (1986), Ford's third novel and his breakout book. He reappeared, eight years older, in Independence Day (1995), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award. Now in his mid-50s, Bascombe returns for a third and supposedly final tilt at happiness in the just-released Lay of the Land (Knopf, 485 pp. $26.95). Bascombe narrates all three of the books, and his rambling, ruminative voice forms a large part of their appeal.

The 62-year-old Ford, lanky, looking fit and full of tart opinions about life, politics and literature, visited Houston on Monday as part of the Inprint Brown Reading Series. He read from The Lay of the Land before a full house at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

"For me, to be a happy man, what you have to be doing is trying to be happy," Ford said, "because there are always going to be forces in your life, particularly as you get older, that drive you in the other direction."

Actually, Frank finds himself leaning into several headwinds in this book. He's battling prostate cancer; his second wife has left him to return to her long-thought-dead first husband; his ex-lesbian daughter has hooked up with a guy Frank finds loathsome; and he's anticipating a Thanksgiving Day visit from his son, with whom relations are strained. That said, Ford's reading underscored how funny the book often is.

"In all three of these books I've tried to find a language that is affirming," Ford said. "Not Pollyanna-ishly affirming, but affirming in the face of all the details of life."

Ford never intended to write three Frank Bascombe novels. But the Bascombe voice pulled on him. It's "brought most of my intelligence and most of my skills and most of my personality as a writer to bear," he said.

But make no mistake: Bascombe isn't Richard Ford. True, both are Democrats, but Frank "is a much nicer man," Ford said. The author notes he's never had children, never been divorced, doesn't live in New Jersey (though he once did), and isn't 55 (though he once was).

Ford flat doesn't buy the idea that novelists work best when they produce fictionalized versions of themselves. "I'm not that interesting a person," he says, "but I think I have the imagination to make persons on the page interesting."

The Lay of the Land is more "political" than its predecessors, says Ford. "Richly, thoroughly political." The political content isn't overt, but Ford, who can grow animated describing failings of the Bush administration, insists that it's there. He resorts to paradox in explaining himself: Politics loom so large in the novel precisely because it doesn't -- and should.

The setting is the clue. The action takes place in late November 2000, after the Bush-Gore presidential election but before the U.S. Supreme Court "stole it from the people."

"It's a book that avers we were asleep," Ford said. "We were thinking about buying houses, thinking about having Thanksgiving, thinking about our ex-wives, thinking about our prostates, all those self-involving preoccupations that Americans are famous for, whereas we should have been thinking about our country."

Frank Bascombe isn't thinking critically about the town he lives in, either: The consumerist American landscape of chain stores, franchise restaurants, billboards, strip shopping centers and tract houses. "We don't look particularly at our suburban environment as a gesture of our own will and volition," Ford said. "We tend to look at our environment as though it happened to us."

But the fact is, most Americans "really do like" their surroundings. Frank, Ford agrees, is a man comfortable in the lay of his land.

On the subject of environment, Ford has extraliterary news to report. He and Kristina are moving back to New Orleans, at least part time. The couple lived there for years before relocating to the Maine coast, and both remain deeply attached to the Crescent City, where Kristina Ford served as city-planning director. They made the decision the week after Katrina. Watching the disaster unfold on television, talking to friends in Louisiana, fighting tears, they realized New Orleans was home.

Ford can't say whether the move will be permanent. "I want to have a sense of optimism, but until I get on the ground, and until she gets on the ground, we don't know. We just want to be there and try to make ourselves, in whatever way we can, useful."

He plans to take a break from writing. He has an idea for a novel -- a shorter novel -- and might start it in a year. But Ford is one of those rare novelists who seriously imagines himself doing something other than novelizing. Before writing The Sportswriter he covered sports for Inside Sports magazine. He's often said that if it hadn't folded, or if Sports Illustrated had given him a job, he might happily have never written another piece of fiction again.

Before embarking on a new project, Ford asks himself hard questions: Does the world need the book I can write? Do I want to dedicate the life I have left to writing another book?

"If you don't ask those questions," he said, "you're not fully in touch with how hard books are to write and how essential books have to be to their readership. You're just doing it again because you did it before."

fritz.lanham@chron.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, Houston Chronicle

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