I’ve been enjoying the rueful, humorous, and melancholy writing of Richard Ford. I first read The Sportswriter, whose title, evocative to me of hollow heartiness, low levels of culture, and rampant provincialism, had put me off for years, until I reminded myself that you can write about anything as long as you do it well—and I discovered that Ford does it very well, and that the fact of the main character’s being a sportswriter is of no more importance than is Leopold Bloom’s being an advertising canvasser. I went on to Ford’s Pulitzer-winning sequel, Independence Day, which is, if anything, better, funnier,lighter of touch, wiser; Balcombe, the ex-sportswriter (who’d first become a sportswriter as a blocked ex-writer), has morphed into a real estate agent. The book abounds in observations about everyday life in suburban New Jersey and how the easiest life is the one led sans ambition, but how that life becomes, all too soon, the emptiest, too: the eternal human bind.
Here’s a clip from Independence Day, one trenchant aperçu among many:
Sometimes, though not that often, I wish I were still a writer, since so much goes through anybody’s mind and right out the window, whereas for a writer—even a shitty writer—so much less is lost. If you get divorced from your wife, for instance, and later think back to a time, say, twelve years before, when you almost broke up the first time but didn’t because you decided you loved each other too much or were too smart, or because you both had gumption and a shred of good character, then later after everything was finished, you decided you actually should’ve gotten divorced long before because you think now you missed something wonderful and irreplaceable and as a result are filled with whistling longing you can’t seem to shake—if you were a writer, even a half-baked short-story writer, you’d have someplace to put that fact buildup so you wouldn’t have to think about it all the time. You’d just write it all down, put quotes around the most gruesome and rueful lines, stick them in somebody’s mouth who doesn’t exist (or better, a thinly disguised enemy of yours), turn it into pathos and get it all off your ledger for the enjoyment of others.
