Ford focus

In a phone conversation last week from a hotel in Oxford, Miss., Ford, 70, said he was “pleasantly surprised” by the book’s popularity; a recent lecture in Pittsburgh attracted 1,000 readers. A commonly held belief by critics and reviewers that novelists sometimes turn to novellas or short story collections to fulfill contracts, but Ford bristles at that suggestion: “It’s not a knockoff by any means." Ford said he didn’t take on a novel because he “didn’t have the chops for it.”

Nevertheless, the collection reads like a novel, with Ford reprising his successful approach in the three Bascombe novels of condensing action around a single holiday — in this case Christmas.

His Pulitzer Prize-winning “Independence Day” takes place on the Fourth of July. “Lay of the Land” is set at Thanksgiving, and his first Bascombe novel, “The Sportswriter,” happens at Easter. Ford has taken Bascombe from a young sportswriter to a middle-aged real estate agent who has gone through a divorce and the death of a young son. “Frank” finds him at 68, retired, remarried and lending his time to charitable activities in his fictional New Jersey town of Haddam.

Ford said he was finished writing about Bascombe after 2004’s “Lay of the Land,” so this collection is seen as coming out of the blue. But he said its existence was inspired by Hurricane Sandy, which hit Bascombe’s stomping grounds of New Jersey in 2012. While driving through the devastation, Ford said he started thinking of Bascombe again.

Ford is at home here with some of his favorite themes like the tenuousness of our existence. And although Bascombe is commonly described with the literary trope “Everyman” (think John Updyke’s Rabbit or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman), Ford dismisses that description.

“Bascombe is just another man,” Ford said.

“I tried to write about him as a singular person. I think he’s just inherited that term.”

In one story, Bascombe drives to the Jersey Shore to provide comfort to hurricane victims. Another covers a visit to Bascombe’s ex-wife in an extended care facility. In one, a friend, dying of cancer, makes a deathbed confession to Bascombe. Some may find Bascombe in his last quarter of his life depressing, but Ford disagrees.

“I find him bracing,” Ford said. “There must be something in my human genome that makes me write these stories the way I do.” As always, Ford’s writing is characterized by lush, detailed descriptions of the landscapes and characters, especially noticeable when he writes about real estate. Reviews for “Frank” have been over-thetop complimentary, but Ford wouldn’t know — he doesn’t read reviews.

“It keeps me from the upsy-downsy emotional involvement,” he said. “I can stay in the bubble of immunity.” (The New York Times claimed that he once spit on a critic who had written an unfavorable review.)

Ford said he always keeps index cards handy, and he records quotes and references he comes across. He’s been doing this more than 25 years and periodically goes through them to refresh his memory.

“If I see something that strikes my fancy I write it down,” he said. “There is constant-ness in things I write down with best ideas circling around the same types of subjects. The cards serve me by reminding me of literature’s higher purpose.”

Some of the quotes he records are on subjects like religion and the tenuousness of existence, which are frequently used as themes in his books.

Ford’s writing career is approaching four decades. He published his first novel, “A Piece of My Heart,” in 1976. Common themes like the accommodations we make in life to things we can’t control are found throughout all of Ford’s books. One of the stories is particularly timely. In the story “Everything Could Be Worse,” Bascombe awkwardly engages a black woman in conversation. Ford, who was raised in Mississippi, is particularly astute in writing about the discomfort of how we deal with race.

“Bascombe is trying to do the right thing, carefully choosing his words, but he makes a complete fool of himself,” Ford said. After high school, Ford pursued his education at Michigan State University to escape the racial prejudices of his home state of Mississippi. As a student at MSU, he saw Malcolm X in 1963 and Martin Luther King in 1965. He recalls that he was more skeptical of King’s message than he was of the ideas espoused by Malcolm X, but he was inherently changed by both experiences.

“(After) I heard them, I wasn’t a Southern cracker by any means,” he said.

Ford said he would not rule out another Bascombe book, but having written a short memoir about his mother, he said he is going to pull out the 25 years worth of notes he’s been collecting to write a second memoir about his father. He’s also got his eyes on a novel based in Sault Ste. Marie, which he visited last year.

“Something about it that struck me,” he said. Well, he hasn’t written a book set at Labor Day yet.