:00:06. > :00:13.will look at a Newsnight investigation into allegations were
:00:13. > :00:17.not broadcast. Now it is time for talking books. I'm a New Jersey for
:00:17. > :00:19.this edition of talking books. My guest is the novelist Richard Ford.
:00:19. > :00:25.One of the most admired insignificant writers of his
:00:26. > :00:29.generation. His trilogy about a sports writer turned estate agent
:00:29. > :00:34.set in a New Jersey suburb planning three decades has made his
:00:34. > :00:38.reputation. Canada, his latest novel has pushed him to the
:00:38. > :00:44.forefront of American writers. One of the reasons for that is he is
:00:44. > :00:50.viewed as a consumer stylist and storyteller with characters so
:00:51. > :01:00.meticulous reshaped that some say his fiction is too popular and
:01:01. > :01:04.
:01:04. > :01:12.urgent to put down. Richard Ford welcome to talking books. You have
:01:12. > :01:18.said that you see writing as a vocation, not a profession. What is
:01:18. > :01:24.the distinction between those two? For me the distinction, a
:01:24. > :01:31.profession is something that goes on a track parallel to your life.
:01:31. > :01:38.Sometimes you live never reaches over and reaches that track. A
:01:38. > :01:44.vocation, come is like a priestly life. A vocation is something that
:01:44. > :01:50.runs along the same rails as your life. We work there is not that
:01:50. > :01:57.distinction. That is how I describe it. There was a moment she felt you
:01:57. > :02:04.had to commit to saying you are a writer. Tell me about that. I was
:02:04. > :02:09.flying with my friend from New York to London. I never go to London. We
:02:09. > :02:14.got to get rid airport. There was a Carby had to fill out. That said
:02:14. > :02:21.your profession? I had never had a profession before. I was 40 plus
:02:21. > :02:28.years old. It did not know what to put. I could not put professor. I
:02:28. > :02:34.could not put railroad engineer. So I finally said that I was a writer.
:02:34. > :02:40.It made me very nervous. I did not feel I had, I did not want a beer
:02:40. > :02:44.that burden. I did not riding books and have an unpublished but writers,
:02:44. > :02:50.to be a writer meant something to me. To say that I was one was
:02:50. > :02:55.climactic. A one to ask about one of the things he said about writing.
:02:55. > :03:01.He said most of life is spent in after part. When we have to be good
:03:01. > :03:08.humans. We're there is no great dramas where we have to live. All
:03:08. > :03:12.your books focus on being informed by that sentiment. Is that a big
:03:13. > :03:20.challenge for you, given in the context of writing a book in terms
:03:20. > :03:26.of plot? What you are implying is that I do not pay that much
:03:26. > :03:30.attention to issues and plot. I'm more in dressed in issues of
:03:30. > :03:34.sentence isn't having important things happen upon the page are
:03:34. > :03:41.both in sentences and at the lives of the people who were described.
:03:41. > :03:45.There would not say it is a particular challenge. If you
:03:45. > :03:53.believe, what you have just said, that morality, ethics are often
:03:53. > :03:59.vividly visible in the consequences of our actions, to try to dramatise
:03:59. > :04:02.the consequences of actions is natively interesting. That is my
:04:02. > :04:09.job. My job is to make interesting what somebody else might look at
:04:09. > :04:13.and think, what is not containing of drama and importance. Do you
:04:13. > :04:20.ever have an exciting that what you describe may stop people from
:04:20. > :04:26.turning the pages. I had that anxiety every night and every day.
:04:26. > :04:30.My idea of a successful book is one that I can make them writer of --
:04:30. > :04:34.reader have read the end of. If I can do that, what you think is your
:04:34. > :04:39.business. Not that I'm indifferent to what you think about it. I will
:04:39. > :04:43.have exposed you to all the imaginations of Norman tricks and
:04:43. > :04:47.scheming son and skills. If I get you to the end I would have had the
:04:47. > :04:52.best chance that you. Why has been most of my time doing his thinking,
:04:52. > :04:57.or somebody read the sentence? If they read it will they think what I
:04:57. > :05:05.want to think. Will they think themselves of one or read the next
:05:05. > :05:12.one now? It is part and parcel of what I do. That is part and parcel
:05:12. > :05:17.probably what everybody who writes novels thinks. In your latest book,
:05:17. > :05:21.Canada, we know the two big events the novel that will take place.
:05:21. > :05:28.First I will tell you about the robbery my parents committed in the
:05:28. > :05:37.in the robberies that got committed later. So you tell us. It could be
:05:37. > :05:42.the opposite. Not really. always have to deliver the goods.
:05:42. > :05:48.Respect off of plotting. There was a plotting decision on my part say
:05:48. > :05:54.to the reader, some place along here, you will come to a murder or
:05:54. > :05:58.a bank robbery. It is not a spoiler, it is a hawk that needs to plant
:05:58. > :06:07.itself in the mind of the reader, not consciously all the time. Once
:06:07. > :06:15.the reader reads that, certain kinds of pressures are acting. He
:06:15. > :06:19.advantage of a good first sentence is great. You have to deliver the
:06:19. > :06:26.goods. You have to get to the bank robbery and the murders. You have
:06:26. > :06:31.to bright some good sentences to get them there. I want to talk
:06:31. > :06:36.about your series of knowledge chills -- series of novels
:06:36. > :06:44.acknowledged as a chronicle of post-war American life and the
:06:44. > :06:48.central character. I never set out to do that. But the main character,
:06:48. > :06:56.Frank Basque and resists that. Why you resist that he is perceived in
:06:56. > :07:04.that way. I don't resist that he be perceived in that way. If you read
:07:04. > :07:12.it Europe liberty to feel what you do. For me, it was being
:07:12. > :07:17.Aristotelian at heart. It was the specifics of one man's life at one
:07:17. > :07:25.identifiable time at a time of not terribly memorable American history.
:07:25. > :07:30.I'm more a creature of the particulars. Of the instant moment.
:07:30. > :07:34.Of individual things felt and thought than I am of things seen
:07:34. > :07:41.from a helicopter looking down on the earth. To see things at a
:07:41. > :07:47.distance, is not my string. That is what my skill set is. That is how I
:07:47. > :07:51.imagine life for my own life. would you characterise this present
:07:51. > :07:57.franc best can who tries his hand at writing fiction quite
:07:57. > :08:01.successfully. Casts it aside and becomes a sports writer. In the
:08:01. > :08:06.next book he becomes estate agent. In the next bookie faces mortality
:08:06. > :08:11.and gets prostate cancer, the backdrop of this is American life.
:08:11. > :08:21.The meticulous miss with which you betray American society makes an
:08:21. > :08:22.
:08:22. > :08:27.emblematic of something? Not to me. The particularity of American life
:08:27. > :08:33.in the history of the moments in which he lives are decisions about
:08:33. > :08:37.sentences. Decisions about what I can do in the background of what he
:08:37. > :08:44.is doing to make what he is doing in the foreground more plausible.
:08:44. > :08:49.In the meantime, I get to front load things into the book that I'm
:08:49. > :08:57.thinking about. Things I may be hearing the news and have opinions
:08:57. > :09:04.about. They always fully in the background. That is not to say I am
:09:04. > :09:12.a complete moron. I do know that the serenade the political books
:09:12. > :09:16.because they do what George Eliot sears, historical novels should do.
:09:16. > :09:21.They should show how history plays itself out in the lives of
:09:21. > :09:26.individuals. I'm principally concerned and the lives of
:09:26. > :09:31.individuals, in that they be betrayed in a way that is
:09:31. > :09:37.empathetic. Not be portrayed in a way that be Little's them by making
:09:37. > :09:40.the ING creatures of larger forces they may not be aware. It is
:09:40. > :09:45.interesting for you acknowledge these are political novels. He did
:09:45. > :09:54.not set out to write a trilogy. What was it about that singular
:09:54. > :09:59.voice of Frank Basque and that tree back to him time and again? It was
:09:59. > :10:04.something I can actually describe. When I was young, I had a
:10:05. > :10:09.bifurcated sense of myself. That I was a person who could have been
:10:09. > :10:15.smart if you would be. I had an instinct to be smart. I wasn't very
:10:15. > :10:20.smart. I wasn't very well educated. I knew how I would feel if I was.
:10:21. > :10:25.There was this instinct full part of me which was blockaded. That is
:10:25. > :10:28.how I love done most of my life. When I started writing books, I
:10:28. > :10:38.thought would be wonderful if I could create characters who were
:10:38. > :10:40.
:10:40. > :10:48.both intuitive but also could in the interior selves, aspire to a
:10:48. > :10:57.certain kind of intelligence. For me, he is so that kind of person. A
:10:57. > :11:01.visceral person who can also talk about a lot of things. He is not
:11:01. > :11:07.necessarily an interpreter that an observer of the passing scene in
:11:07. > :11:14.his lives. In the process of trying to create a voice, supple enough to
:11:15. > :11:22.be both Raya, direct he was the product of that. He is not my
:11:22. > :11:26.Monaco. Frank is not somebody who speaks for me. He is not self-
:11:26. > :11:31.expression for me. He does lots of things I would not doing things
:11:31. > :11:36.lots of things I don't think. His sense of humour and sense of
:11:36. > :11:43.seriousness are something I do not understand. Why has it ever
:11:43. > :11:49.conscious effort on your part to make his story set in a place which
:11:49. > :11:56.you will find all over America, the suburbs of America, particularly
:11:56. > :12:01.eerie New Jersey? The new -- the novel seem to be a pay on to the
:12:01. > :12:08.subjects. What was it about is that made you think you one or Mary
:12:08. > :12:12.Banias of this to be a big part of what I'm writing? I thought the
:12:12. > :12:17.vocabulary of the suburbs, the commonplace vocabulary from the
:12:17. > :12:21.kinds of things that people say about the suburbs to the names of
:12:21. > :12:28.places and Suburbs and what the landscape in Suburbs looks like is
:12:28. > :12:33.interesting. And in some instances quite funny. Here the issue, more
:12:33. > :12:39.forcefully for me was that I wanted to write books that went against
:12:39. > :12:45.ordinary grain. The ordinary story about the suburbs is that they have
:12:45. > :12:51.deathly, waste lands, in her it they are anaesthetised life. I
:12:51. > :12:57.wanted to say, a wanted to take the other view. They are the product of
:12:57. > :13:01.our lives. They are the realisations of our wishes. This is
:13:01. > :13:05.what they look like. This is what happens when you realise your
:13:05. > :13:12.wishes. You may as well love them if you have to do anything about
:13:12. > :13:18.the more with them. In that way, it was a full on effort to go against
:13:18. > :13:21.the commonplace. You start by describing them with huge
:13:21. > :13:26.generosity and the language is Marsh and questioning the
:13:26. > :13:36.conventional definitions of them. By Independence Day something has
:13:36. > :13:39.
:13:39. > :13:45.I think that they all sound exactly alike. Then that one person will
:13:45. > :13:51.say that one book is distinct from the other. But I am not terribly
:13:51. > :14:01.aware of that. I think that Frank continues living, continues to
:14:01. > :14:06.Marite these stories. -- now rate. But I am not entirely aware of it
:14:06. > :14:11.being so distinct. Let me take you back to your childhood in
:14:11. > :14:18.Mississippi. What was it like and why did she leave Mississippi?
:14:18. > :14:24.many reasons. The poor little boy who never fit in... I didn't fit in
:14:24. > :14:30.because my parents had moved to Mississippi one year before I was
:14:30. > :14:38.born. I had no connections growing up. I fitted in as best as I could
:14:38. > :14:48.but I never had that sense of being anchored to the place. It was a
:14:48. > :14:49.
:14:49. > :14:54.remarkably Tova did time in the south. -- turbid. It was thick with
:14:54. > :15:01.violence and hypocrisy and animus. I was not a very good at being a
:15:01. > :15:05.race hate her. You were aware of all of that? Yes, I did my best to
:15:05. > :15:10.fit in. To fit in, you had to walk that Walker and talk that talk but
:15:10. > :15:14.I couldn't do it with any conviction. I couldn't commit to
:15:14. > :15:20.the idea that there was another whole race in the world that was
:15:20. > :15:26.less than I am. It seemed convenient when high school ended
:15:26. > :15:32.to disappear. So that was what I did. It wasn't an act of courage.
:15:32. > :15:36.If anything, it was an act of personal cowardice. If I had been
:15:36. > :15:42.courageous, if I had been smart enough to be courageous, I would
:15:42. > :15:46.have stuck around and fought for my principles. Instead, I went to
:15:46. > :15:51.Michigan State University and tried to put that behind me, tried to
:15:51. > :15:58.start over again, tried to go some place where nobody knew my parents,
:15:58. > :16:06.knew my history. I even gave myself a new name. Instead of calling
:16:06. > :16:11.myself Richard, I caught myself Dicks. It was a reinvention.
:16:11. > :16:17.yet, you regard Mississippi as home. I have had to live up to that
:16:17. > :16:24.through the years. I have had to go back and go back and go back. I
:16:24. > :16:28.have had the luxury of more or less a good writing life in Mississippi
:16:28. > :16:33.and general respect. This is the state of Tennessee Williams, after
:16:33. > :16:38.all, people who made me respect writers. Easier for me than it
:16:38. > :16:46.would have been for someone else to go back to Mississippi. I have had
:16:46. > :16:51.to deal with a lot over those 50 years. That is a long time. And you
:16:51. > :16:55.have only set one of your books in Mississippi, in the south, but why
:16:55. > :17:01.not more? Why do you not feel like you want to connect with it through
:17:01. > :17:06.your writing? I might come to feel like that one day again. The first
:17:06. > :17:10.book I wrote I wrote to through a gut instinct, that sent to me that
:17:11. > :17:16.if you asked from Mississippi, that is what you have got to write about.
:17:16. > :17:22.That if you are from Mississippi, you have to write for southerners.
:17:22. > :17:26.But it quickly occurred to me that I had nothing new to say about the
:17:26. > :17:30.south. Everything I had to say about the self I had already read
:17:30. > :17:34.about in Dyffryn novels. So I thought I had to quit writing about
:17:34. > :17:39.the South or else I would never reach a reader should outside of
:17:39. > :17:44.the South. And I came to understand that I had a hunger to write for
:17:44. > :17:48.readers who were not just southerners. I thought to myself
:17:48. > :17:55.that I should live up to my own aspirations, even if I did not know
:17:55. > :18:01.what they were, and tried to write for everybody. In your latest novel,
:18:01. > :18:04.Canada, America is present by its absence. Why did you choose to call
:18:04. > :18:11.the book Canada? What are you saying about the relationship
:18:11. > :18:16.between the two countries? I don't really have a view about what I'm
:18:16. > :18:19.saying. I am just lucky that I can say it at all. I wanted to set it
:18:19. > :18:25.in Canada because my private experience with Canada has been so
:18:25. > :18:29.good over the last 50 years that I have been going there. Whenever I
:18:29. > :18:37.cross the border from the law were 4-Yate into Canada, I always feel
:18:37. > :18:47.this wonderful sense of rising in my spirit. And maybe it is partly
:18:47. > :18:49.
:18:49. > :18:54.because America is such an incident country. -- exigent country. And
:18:54. > :18:59.Canada is not. Also, Canada is such a tolerant place in a way that
:18:59. > :19:05.America is not. Most people are not armed in Canada, property rights
:19:05. > :19:10.don't mean in Canada what they mean in America. America was founded on
:19:10. > :19:14.the notion of property rights, whereas Canada was not. For me, it
:19:15. > :19:19.is just a generally different experience but that is just my
:19:19. > :19:24.personal experience. I was trying, in writing about Canada, to find a
:19:24. > :19:34.language, dramatic language, for what seemed to me to be about
:19:34. > :19:40.
:19:40. > :19:44.Canada some place of renewal. So I had my character leave a bad place
:19:44. > :19:54.in the US, find even worse circumstances in Canada and then to
:19:54. > :20:00.outlive it. To restore himself. he stays there. Yes, he becomes a
:20:00. > :20:09.Canadian at the end of the book, rather than go across the Detroit
:20:09. > :20:15.river. Also, I like the word Canada. It has wonderful concert mental and
:20:15. > :20:20.vowel sounds. -- consonants and vowels sounds. I like seeing it
:20:20. > :20:25.when it is written on a page. Even though there was some pressure from
:20:25. > :20:30.a publishing house to change the title, no-one had any success.
:20:30. > :20:35.idea of loving how a word looks on the page is very important to you.
:20:35. > :20:41.Many people say you are a consulate stylist, the language, detail and
:20:41. > :20:48.effort it takes to produce what you produce the is your hallmark as a
:20:48. > :20:54.writer. That usually means I am not making any money. Not true in your
:20:54. > :21:01.case. Not enough. Consulate stylers to usually means he is broke. They
:21:01. > :21:07.write's writer means he is broke. I got lucky as I got older. I am
:21:07. > :21:13.dyslexic so I don't just see language as a medium for cognition.
:21:13. > :21:18.I see language as objects on a page that have links, which and sounds
:21:18. > :21:25.associated with them. And all of those things to someone with
:21:25. > :21:30.dyslexia are consequential. So is the coveted part, get in from a
:21:30. > :21:34.word it to the meaning in the brain, is somewhat impeded. I have got to
:21:34. > :21:40.listen very carefully when people talk to me or I will not remember
:21:40. > :21:46.it or have heard anything. It has made me a very good listener
:21:46. > :21:50.perforce. And it has made me a slow reader. But as a slow reader, I
:21:50. > :21:54.have come to appreciate all the good things that languages.
:21:54. > :21:59.writing in your books appears effortless but I suspect it is
:21:59. > :22:04.really not. I think probably in everybody's practice, that is where
:22:05. > :22:10.we spend most of our time. Working long sentences, writing them once
:22:10. > :22:15.and then writing them again. Everybody works pretty hard on his
:22:15. > :22:21.or her sentences. For me, with a mind that is basically in chaos all
:22:21. > :22:27.the time, the ability to articulate a sentence is pretty much trying to
:22:27. > :22:32.make sense out of chaos. I have got to work out that pretty hard. That
:22:32. > :22:39.said, my goal in writing sentences is to make them money fearless, to
:22:39. > :22:45.make them beautiful, interesting and in massive. But more than
:22:45. > :22:51.anything, I want to create sentences that make the extremely
:22:51. > :22:57.complex and difficult accessible. Four would you advise a young
:22:57. > :23:02.person who says to you, I want to try my hand at writing, would you
:23:02. > :23:07.say, yet, or give them a go? For it they said I want to try my hand at
:23:07. > :23:16.writing, I would say yes. If they had that kind of tentativeness
:23:16. > :23:21.about it, I would say sure. It is a victimless crime, go ahead. If
:23:21. > :23:26.someone said to me, what I want to be more than anything else is to be
:23:26. > :23:33.a novelist, I would say, why don't you try to talk yourself out of it?
:23:33. > :23:37.Because you will probably fail. The vicissitudes of life are that so
:23:37. > :23:41.many circumstances... You have got to marry the right person, you have
:23:41. > :23:46.got to be in the right situation, you have got to not be a drug...
:23:46. > :23:51.Many of these things have to a line in order for you to even get access
:23:51. > :23:57.to being able to do the work. And if you do the work, there is no
:23:57. > :24:01.guarantee that any body will even write it. If you look at the World
:24:01. > :24:06.-- if you look at being useful to the world, there are lots of
:24:06. > :24:09.different ways that someone can be useful to the world without reining
:24:09. > :24:13.horrors down upon themselves. Then if the person says they have tried