Still in Print: The Southern Novel Today

Richard Ford: The Lay of the Land

Richard Ford The Lay of the Land Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. A Biographical Sketch Richard Ford’s trilogy about a man’s life in New Jersey joins a number of other recent novels by southern writers who have chosen to set their work outside the South. Unlike southern writers of previous generations, who almost always set their work in the small-town or rural South, Ford and many other contemporary southern writers are traveling further afield, clearly less bound to the significance of place, particularly a southern sense of place. As I have discussed in my book Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, the waning of regionalism and regional identity in the United States during an age of globalism has freed the southern literary imagination to explore new forms, issues, and settings, many of which are not at first glance distinctly or characteristically southern. Ford’s fiction exemplifies this broadening . Of his six novels and two collections of stories, only Ford’s first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), is set in the South; his other works take place in a variety of far-flung places, from Mexico to Montana to New England to Paris. If Ford has a fictional home, it is one that moves, often being wherever he happens to be living when he is writing. In both his interviews and his fiction, Ford repeatedly downplays the significance of place as an active force shaping lives—an attitude summed up neatly by Frank Bascombe in Independence Day: “Place means nothing” (ID, 152). What Bascombe means, as Ford himself has pointed out in an interview, is that however much we might want a specific location to imbue meaning upon our lives, the only meaning that a place delivers is what we ourselves create for that place. Places by themselves are meaningless ; what the human mind makes of these places is not. As Ford has put it: In talking about sense of place, or locatedness, or the importance of place, or how we feel about it, that figure of speech gets made perplexingly literal sometimes, and in that transaction personally responsible for how one feels, and what’s important about place gets shed or lost. Therefore, my view is that anything you feel about a place, anything that you think about place at all, you have authored and ascribed to some piece of geography. Everything Richard Ford The Lay of the Land 249 that defines locatedness is then something that you yourself generate. So if it’s a sense of place you experience, you’re just expressing what you feel and which you say the place has created. (Guagliardo 2001, 142). Ironically Ford’s ideas about place in large part originate, as Elinor Ann Walker discusses in her fine book on Ford, in his southern origins and upbringing . Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944, to parents who had recently settled there; before that time the two had for many years enjoyed an itinerant existence, living on the road as Ford’s father made his travels as a starch salesman. As Ford notes in a memoir, before settling in Jackson, his parents “had never had to choose a ‘home,’ a place to be in permanently,” and it was only with his mother’s pregnancy that the two decided to forego their transient life (Ford 1987, 46). Ford’s childhood was a mixture of settledness and unsettledness. Although the family was now established in Jackson, his father continued working as a traveling salesman and was usually home only on the weekends. Contributing to the sense of instability was his father’s declining health stemming from serious heart problems; and when Ford was sixteen his father suffered a second—and fatal—heart attack. The Lay of the Land “The permanent life” of impermanence, with all its complications, is precisely what Frank Bascombe struggles with in all three novels of Ford’s trilogy, but his efforts are perhaps most charged and intense in The Lay of the Land, since his cancer has made him piercingly aware of his own precarious existence and of death’s ever-present shadow. As in The Sportswriter and Independence Day, Frank develops various strategies, characteristically of avoidance, to survive the death of his son Ralph and the breakup of his marriage—crushing blows that tumble his life. In The Sportswriter, for instance, he repeatedly testifies to the value of ignoring what has come before and of leaving the past as far behind as...