Spark by Julie Burstein

Author:Julie Burstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Novelist Richard Ford

“Lots of things I choose to write about, inevitably they’re something I’ve known about for years but that for some reason or another never migrated into my imagination as something I could use.”

Weaving Childhood Stories

In 1996, Richard Ford won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Pen/Faulkner Award for Independence Day, which takes place on the Fourth of July. It was his second novel about the life of Frank Bascombe (the first, The Sportswriter, is set during an Easter holiday). Ford’s Bascombe was a novelist who abandoned fiction for sportswriting when he was in his thirties, and then abandoned sportswriting to become a real estate salesman. Over the course of the first two novels, he wrestles with the death of his young son and the end of his marriage.

In 2006, Ford published the final part of his Bascombe trilogy, a novel he called The Lay of the Land. Set just before Thanksgiving in 2000, this novel finds Bascombe in what he calls “the Permanent Period” of life in one’s fifties, driving around central New Jersey, selling houses and ruminating on the botched presidential election, real estate values at the Jersey Shore, and the vicissitudes of back roads and backwaters in the central part of the state. Bascombe also mulls over what has become of the essential characters in his life, including his grown son and daughter, the son who died in childhood, his Tibetan real estate partner, and his estranged second wife.

In the middle of the novel, Bascombe indulges an ex-girlfriend’s ancient and ornery father in the old man’s favorite pastime: viewing the demolition of hotels in Asbury Park. While he watches the structure of a hotel implode, Bascombe is caught up in an ancient memory of an afternoon when his mother unknowingly ran over their new kitten, Mittens. Just after The Lay of the Land was published, Richard Ford explained that this image comes directly out of his own childhood, when, in 1950, Ford’s mother pulled out of their driveway in Jackson, Mississippi, and accidentally killed the family cat. Richard, her six-year-old son, was the only witness.

“She didn’t know she ran over the cat and just backed out into the street and drove away and I was left alone at the house with the cat in its death throes,” Ford said. “Obviously traumatic, okay, but a lot of traumatic things don’t make their way into your book. . . . I picked the little cat up and I ran next door where there was this old Civil War veteran—you can imagine that, a Civil War veteran, at least he said he was—sitting on the front porch. A very, very, very old, turkey-necked man. I ran up to him and I said, ‘My cat, my cat’s been run over!’ And he was of course as addlepated as could be and he said, ‘Oh, I think you’ve got a Persian there, but it looks like something’s wrong with it.’ I’ve known that story all my life, but I haven’t ever thought that it would ever find its way into something I wrote.

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