“The last time I went fishing with Captain Jehovah I hooked myself under the back of my hand,” Richard Ford said as he scanned the ethnic food aisle at Hannaford’s, searching for a jar of tapenade. “I tried to push it through the underside of my skin so we could cut the barb off. But skin is tough.”

  A friend on the boat — a famous author — told him to “stop being a pussy” and just take a swig of whiskey so he could get it over with, he told me as he strode with purpose towards the pickles and olives section. Ford had scheduled us for a fishing charter with Captain Jehovah in the morning.

“Is that what you did?” I asked. 

“Hell no. This wasn’t Andersonville,” Ford said, referring to the Confederate prisoner of war camp. He weighed the merits of jarred pesto. “I went to the hospital.” 

His phone rang. 

“That’s probably my sweet girl calling me now.”

Richard Ford isn’t a bad boy. He’s a sweetheart. A darling. An angel. That is, according to his wife, Kristina — his “sweet girl,” who he once called, in an essay he wrote about her for Esquire, “the person I would want to be if I did not have to be myself.” For the last 57 years the two of them have lived all across the country, sometimes moving for Kristina’s job as a city planner, sometimes for Richard’s teaching, and sometimes just for the fun of it. Today, they reside in a charming Cape Code-style home near the central coastline of Maine with two friendly Brittany spaniels, dog-eared New Yorkers on the kitchen table, pheasant-themed placemats, and petite ceramic hunter figurines. Mornings spent over coffee watching the goldfinches through the picture window. Evenings spent beside the fire with a bottle of white wine.

But come on: Richard Ford is supposed to be a bad boy. At least, that’s what his trepidatious profiler had been led to expect. For over fifty years he has been the chronicler of gritty, unsentimental lives in books like Rock Springs, Wildlife, and The Sportswriter, works with a realism so close-shaven that one assumes its lessons must have been borne of their author’s own hard experience. He is the kid brother in a literary family whose patriarch was Hemingway, and which had its heyday in American letters almost fifty years ago. He hunted with Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane, shot pool with Barry Hannah, and fly-fished with Raymond Carver. (At least, Ford fly-fished; Carver stuck cheese on a hook and, according to Ford, “caught lots more fish.”) Critics, of course, beware: One who once crossed him was spat on at a party; another received a copy of her own book in the mail with a bullet hole bored into the center. (“Well, my wife shot it first,” he told The Guardian in 2003.) He is not the type of writer, in other words, you expect to find hunting the aisles at Hannaford’s for his wife’s favorite jar of tapenade.

Walt Whitman once said — and Frank Bascombe, the legendary narrator Ford introduced to the world in 1986 with his novel The Sportswriter, once affirmed — that “any character, truly wrought, must contradict himself.” Certainly, that must be true of authors, too, and all the more so of authors like Ford, who live and write well into old age. Much of the man you can find scowling handsomely from the back of his dust jackets remains the same: solid frame, thick arms, imposing dome, and mineral blue eyes, like the pooled deposit of some cavernous intelligence that for the last 81 years has dripped its consciousness into the world. The man under the skin, though, is one that only Ford himself appears to be capable of hooking. 

“If I can use whatever I make of myself to write something that will make a difference to you, then I’ve done my job, even if I have to make myself out to be someone I’m not,” Ford told me shortly after I arrived.

Pity the visitor, then, who comes tasked with a profile assignment predicated on a bad-boy persona by which he had been craftily misled. 

Captain Jehovah is every inch a Mainer, in a pair of beefy crocs, gym shorts, an old gray T-shirt and pair of polarized sunglasses. Jehovah’s wife manages the Tugboat Inn, a family operation which has been in Boothbay for generations. The Captain makes a living on chartering scientific explorations of Casco Bay, plus occasional tips when his band, The Holy Mackerels, plays at local bars. Ford has known the Captain for over twenty years, ever since he caught him fishing off his dock. 

“I thought he might shoot me,” the Captain said, chuckling. I sympathized with his fear. “Instead he asked if I was having any luck with the striper.” 

The two friends caught up as Ford scurried at starboard to untie ropes from pylons so Jehovah could back out of the dock. They talked about the fishing season, their wives, a local billionaire who built (illegally) on the edge of his property, a woman who recently left her husband to go back to bartending. Friends who died. Friends who left. Friends who turned Republican. 

Ford’s a good talker. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, to parents from Arkansas, he spent his childhood in the South, his college years in Michigan, and, after he and Kristina married in their early twenties, the rest of his life just about everywhere else: New Orleans, New York, Princeton, Oaxaca, Oxford, Coahoma, Irvine, Missoula, Billings, Chinook, St. Louis, Maine, Vermont. “I can imitate with my voice the voices of many parts of the country,” Ford once wrote in an essay for Harper’s about his itinerant life. “An ideal, average American is, I think, so experienced, and I want to be him — at home in the whole country, not just some part of it.” 

“My home is wherever Kristina is,” Ford explained to me after we got under way. “Whenever she’s there, I’m home. It could be on a Greyhound bus. It could be anywhere.” 

His writing is likewise transcontinental. A Piece of My Heart, Ford’s first novel, was set in his native Mississippi; The Ultimate Good Luck, his second, takes place in Mexico. But the works that rise to the top of his fifty-year career invariably fall into two longitudinal camps: the Western books like Wildlife and Rock Springs, both set in the wide prairie country of Montana; and the Eastern books in the Bascombe series, all of which, with the exception of the final novel, are set in the suburbs of New Jersey. 

The best of Ford’s Western books — better to say “books set in the West” — have the same spare beauty and patience as the stories of Hemingway’s In Our Time. They are lean yet filling, like dried pemmican, and parched of all nostalgia so that even the smallest flicker of sentiment can set the reader’s emotions ablaze. The writer Richard Rodriguez once called the Westerner, in comparison to his Eastern compatriot, “the less innocent party in the conversation,” and in Ford’s Western stories this certainly rings true. From a young age the narrators, often children, seem to know too much. “This is not a happy story. I warn you,” the young narrator of “Great Falls,” a story about a boy witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, says in its opening line. 

Ford is indeed an apt mimic, and these books show off his ear for Big Sky dialect (my favorite, from the novel Wildlife, is “soapstone son of a bitch”). What he is even better at though is tuning a sentence so that place is not signified at the expense of originality. Take a line from Rock Springs in which a character describes his relationship with a woman who has agreed to ride with him across Montana: “I don’t know what was between Edna and me, just beached by the same tides when you got down to it.” Many of Ford’s sentences are like this: language that is just adjacent to vernacular receives a necessary ballast of poetry so that it avoids floating to the surface of cliché. A phrase like “just beached by the same tides” starts out in a casual tone with a very slight rhyme on a cliché — just beached, just peached — but ends in a rich literary register: “by the same tides” (Joyce in Ulysses: “these heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here”). Packaged together, it creates an accessible yet compelling voice, both familiar and strange at once. 

Ford can use that voice to teach lessons different from those that Western readers have become accustomed to. Western narratives regularly derive their moral character from the archetype of the boomtown: hubris and greed lead to interpersonal or ecological exploitation but succumb finally, and usually painfully, to natural forces. Boom-and-bust cycles provide a backdrop to Ford’s stories too, but he pays more attention to the essential loneliness that is leftover when the big show hits the road, a kind of loneliness that makes someone distrust language because he knows nothing is ever fixed in place. “There are words, significant words, you do not want to say,” the narrator of Wildlife claims after his father impulsively leaves his mother to fight forest fires. “Words that account for busted-up lives, words that try to fix something ruined that shouldn’t be ruined and no one wanted ruined, and that words can’t fix anyway.” Wallace Stegner once criticized Western writers for their reliance on nostalgia to fix what he called the “amputated present” of the West — that sense of dislocation characters in Ford’s stories seem to feel. Instead of looking into a mythologized past for answers, Ford’s characters turn inward and try to learn something about themselves that allows them to go on living. Unlike many writers, he gives Westerners not only a past and present, but a future.

Back East, things could not be peachier. Cloudless sky. Clear water. Mild northerly wind. Captain Jehovah recently replaced the motor on his boat, The Red Hook, and discovered he’d lost a few knots. No matter. Ford let his profiler take a seat next to the Captain on the elevated helm while he hung out on the ladder, chin resting on his hands. He wore floral swim trunks, a cotton T-shirt with a small moose silhouette printed over chest, a ballcap, and a green bandana tied around his neck. 

First stop was Cuckold Island to catch some mackerel for bait. The profiler asked the obvious.

“Not sure,” Captain Jehovah said. “It originally just had a lighthouse, then it was an inn. It’s been named that as long as any of us can remember.” 

“Probably had something to do with the innkeeper’s wife,” Ford suggested. 

The Captain sprinkled oatmeal into the water, which caught the light and attracted a school of fish over from the rocks. In quick succession Ford hooked a handful and dropped them into an empty bait bucket. 

“I like being outside,” Ford said. “I love just sitting on the bow of the boat, chucking bait in the water and watching the line. Once in a while, a fish gets on and that’s fun too, but most of the time you spend without a fish on the line, and most of the time when you’re hunting you’re not shooting anything or picking anything up. You’re just out there doing it. It’s very much like writing novels. You’re mostly not finishing a novel on any given day, or starting one, you’re just there in the middle of it. That’s what I like.” 

Jehovah steered into the tidal waters at the wide mouth of the Sheepscot River. Laughing gulls hovering above nearby charters taunted the hapless fishermen as he motored past. Striper fishing had been lean this season, and despite Ford’s equanimity the Captain’s face already showed signs of anxiety over the day’s prospects. Striped bass are mercurial fish, the Captain explained; a slight change in tide or wind can send them packing. But if anyone knows the mysteries of the deep it is Jehovah, and after a brief moment of indecision he signaled for Ford to drop the anchor at a spot a hundred yards or so from a state beach. 

The Captain fetched the spinning rods while Ford chopped up the mackerel on a galvanized prep board, the fish guts staining his hands the color of beet juice. A family of porpoise-shaped white Americans strolled along the beach and waved at the boat. Ford hooked three pieces of bait and handed out the poles, then took a seat in the shadow of the helm and waved back. Gentle rollers rocked the boat pleasantly. The old novelist put his deck shoes on the railing to balance himself. He was back in the longed-for middle. 

Here is perhaps the most surprising thing about Richard Ford: Despite growing up in the South and spending most of his free time fishing and birdhunting in the West, he is best known for creating a character, Frank Bascombe, who delights in nothing more than the simple pleasures of a workaday life in suburban New Jersey. Bookended by The Sportswriter and Be Mine, Ford’s suburban novels follow their first-person narrator, Frank Bascombe, as he contends with the death of his oldest son, divorce, fatherhood, remarriage, cancer, violence, natural disaster, and, finally, the death of his remaining son, all while transitioning from a career as a short-story writer to a short-lived juncture as a sportswriter to, triumphantly, a real-estate agent.

Plot is secondary in these books. What gives them lift is Ford’s way of describing Frank’s Emersonian quest to find goodness in quotidian life. Ford is himself an old-school liberal, the kind who listens to baseball on the radio, plays squash at the Y, votes in-person, and believes that the American dream is not inherently a bad thing. Frank, likewise, nestles comfortably into civic life; his to-do list when he visits a new town for an extended stay would make Tocqueville smile: subscribe to the local newspaper, sign up for library cards, rent a PO box, and “anoint a dry cleaner (Free Will), a car repair (Babbitt’s Mostly Mufflers), a drugstore (Little Pharma).... All I can [do] to solidify an idea of ‘normal life.’” 

The corny symbolism here — Free Will, Babbitt’s, Little Pharma — is a unique moment in the Bascombe series because Ford more often dedicates himself to the sound of language than to its ability to convey a system of meaning. A typical sentence in a Bascombe novel disguises nothing. Take a line from Independence Day — the first novel ever to be awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN Faulkner Award — in which Frank describes a murder of crows passing over his neighborhood: “Crows fly over — two, six, twelve — in ragged, dipping lines, squawking as though to say, ‘Today is not a holiday for crows. Crows work.’” The species and number of birds are both choices the author makes, and therefore typically present themselves to a reader as opportunities for analysis, for finding a deeper meaning. Has a death just been foreshadowed? Is the number sequence an internal reference to Frank’s anxiety about his accumulating tenants, or an external allusion to, say, Christ’s accumulation of disciples? Both?! 

“‘Two, six, twelve’... it just had the right number of syllables,” Ford explains. “I’m never using one moment to point to another moment. I’m trying to keep you in the present moment as much as I possibly can, because there is where I want you. One of the felicities I can use to keep you in the scene and not close the book is that I can write a really interesting sentence, both in its sonorities, in how many syllables it has, in how it looks on the page. I never worry about what something might mean, because I’m always trying to put people in situations in which they’re doing something that is ipso facto meaningful.”

What this emphasis on sonority and felicity allows Ford to do is focus on the poetry of the suburbs rather than their sociological underpinnings. Novels that reveal material forces behind everyday life, like those that explore the structural inequalities present in a suburban neighborhood, are important, but in liberal circles they’re also really common. Often they arrive packaged as “autofiction,” a genre that the critic Giles Harvey describes as the ideal solution for white male novelists worried of being suspected to possess a “universalizing impulse” — that is, a presumption that their narrators speak for all Americans. In autofiction, a writer defends himself against this accusation by creating a narrator that is in all important respects identical to himself — in race, gender, class, education, family, even name — thereby emphasizing that he only speaks for one person. The writer will then connect their narrator to the rest of the world in a virtuous way by unraveling the systemic issues that tie people together: capitalism, racism, climate change, etc. In an autofictional novel like Ben Lerner’s 10:04, something is almost always something else. A can of instant coffee reveals to the narrator not a personal memory or a sensation but rather “the social relations that produced the object… the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself.” 

I won’t lie, I like this kind of writing, because I think material analysis is important to understanding the structural inequalities that benefit greed and impede progress. But I also like instant coffee. Ford’s writing points us towards the goodness possible in the compromise we must make between an ethical and an enjoyable life. Few things represent that compromise more than the suburbs, and for that reason they are irresistible to Ford. 

“It is the bottom of the day,” Frank intones late in The Sportswriter, while driving through New Jersey, “the deep well of shadows and springy half-light when late afternoon becomes early evening and we all want to sit down in a leather chair by an open window, have a drink near someone we love or like, read the sports and possibly doze for a while, then wake before the day is gone all the way, walk our cool yards and hear the birds chirp in the trees their sweet eventide songs. It is for such dewy interludes that our suburbs were built… It is a pastoral kind of longing, of course, but we can all have it.”

“Leavis has this line, ‘Literature is the means by which we renew our sensuous and emotional life and learn a new awareness,’” Ford later told me, sitting at his desk. “I want anybody who reads a book of mine to come away with a new awareness. I didn’t want my books to be darkness for its own sake. I wanted there to be an opportunity for Frank to be someone who liked something. I wanted him to be able to use language and use whatever I made him do to find some kind of reason to feel affirmed.”

“Affirmed about what?” 

Ford pointed to a mug on his desk, the only totem present aside from a photograph of him and Kristina. Etched onto the mug’s exterior were two words: Define Good

It could be that this is why Ford’s work has lately fallen a bit out of fashion. The final Bascombe novel, Be Mine, came out in 2023. Even though it marked the end of a preeminent American writer’s forty-year project, coverage in American media was scant. No American magazine has interviewed or profiled Ford since 2017. Let it be known that it’s not because he has phoned his latest books in. Be Mine is a remarkable novel following Frank and his son Paul, who has recently been diagnosed with ALS, on a road trip to Mount Rushmore. There is heartbreaking symmetry with The Sportswriter, which begins after a child’s death, as well as Independence Day, which follows Frank and Paul on a road trip to Cooperstown, and there’s a lot of humor in seeing Ford take his suburban characters out West. (Plus, it has the best final line in the whole series, hands down).

But there are things that Ford doesn’t do that a writer is evidently supposed to have done in a novel with a contemporary setting. Trump is only mentioned once, and not until page 58. COVID doesn’t come up until page 330, and then not even by name. Above all, Ford does not evince cynicism. Frank goes on looking for something good in his compromised reality, which is the world most of us still have to keep living in.

For his part, Ford credits the lack of press to something else. “I think maybe why Be Mine didn’t do better than it did may just have to do with me,” he admitted, before taking a long pause. “It may be that I’m just difficult, you know, just not altogether likable. I think it may have just as much to do with me and the kind of person I am and the kind of way I have behaved in my life. It may also just be that people think, ‘He’s had enough good come his way.’ And, you know, maybe I have?”

“Boy, George doesn’t know what he’s missing out on, huh?” Captain Jehovah declared from the sunny deck. Ford nodded in agreement. It seemed that George — whoever he was — knew exactly what he was missing out on, as the placid water had offered no bites for the better part of an hour. There were worse outcomes for me, having only ever fished in the water traps on Arizona’s golf courses, than sitting with slacked lines for an afternoon while chatting leisurely about writing. Fewer bites meant more notes.

“Got one!” Ford called out suddenly, rising to his feet. Then my own line suddenly went taut. “Kiss my ass George!” he hollered. Jehovah thundered over my shoulder, imploring me to keep the pole raised. Ford brought his in first, and by some dumb luck I kept mine hooked on the line and brought it in seconds after. Jehovah reached down and brought them both up with a net, then removed the hooks. I inexpertly stuck one thumb into the bass’s mouth, whereupon it was bit, and the other onto its fin, whereupon it was pierced. The fat spectators on the beach cheered.

“Wait’ll George gets a load of this!” 

Ford insisted the brave warriors be released back to their tribe. The older he gets, he said, the more inclined he is to let his catch go. According to my camera roll, a total of five fish were brought in that day, though by Ford’s count it was six. “I think we actually caught seven,” Captain Jehovah whispered conspiratorially, not wanting to contradict the client. As far as that poor sap George knows, it was eight.

As The Red Hook motored back into the harbor, Ford laid out on the deck with his head resting on his hands, staring into the sudsy wake. 

“When I think about when I would go hunting with my grandfather in Arkansas, I don’t think very much about dogs being on point and the birds coming up. I think about when we get to the end of the hunt but we still have two miles to walk back to the car. I think about that. I think about the way I felt, thinking to myself, ‘Oh shit. Now we’re finished. We have to walk back to the car.’ But I kind of love that. I don’t like it, but I love it. Because we’d just be walking, I would be tired, and the car was a long way away. It’s a little bit of oppositional thinking. Rather than saying, ‘This is not fun. I don’t like it,’ I’m more apt to say, ‘This is not fun. I love it.’” 

Back at the dock, Jehovah finally admitted he wasn’t sure that when we set out there would actually be any fish. Ford smiled. 

“I'm a novelist,” he answered. “I’m optimistic by nature. I just think if you go out there you’ve got a chance.”