Author Richard Ford and Post-Gazette Book Editor Bob Hoover sat down for a wide-ranging discussion May 27 at BookExpo America in Washington, D.C. The author talked about his upcoming novel, "The Lay of the Land," a continuation of the story of Frank Bascombe, the hero of Ford's earlier novels, "The Sportswriter" (1985) and "Independence Day" (1996). Click photo for larger image. Interview highlights The third Bascombe book gave the author the opportunity to write about some new themes. Politics is an important theme. He carefully chose to set the story at the end of the millenium. He explores the issue of mortality as seen through the eyes of a man in his mid-50s. From the Mayo Clinic to Hallmark greeting cards, the author wanted his characters to have experiences in certain institutions. For the exploration of these themes, he draws from his imagination, not personal experience. Fine-tuning of the book will continue through July so the author can make his last visit with the Bascombe character as good as possible.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- This city is not Richard Ford territory; he's more at home in his native South or along the East Coast shoreline where he both lives part of the year and has located his long-enduring hero, Frank Bascombe.

For starters, Ford is a writer of careful, clear prose, the antithesis of the federal government's communications style.

As he explains, "Clarity of language historically, thinking of Orwell, meant clarity of thought," he said, "that you've actually uttered something and thought about it afterwards."

Plus the concerns and locales of his fiction -- the human heart and the heartlands of America -- seem a long way from this marble city of cynical wheeling and dealing.

Ford is here because it's the site of BookExpo America, the national trade show that wrapped up last Sunday. His third and final Bascombe novel, "The Lay of the Land," will be published in the fall, and his publisher wants him to talk about it.

And talk he does, from an 8 a.m. breakfast chat before 1,000 all the way down to me in the lobby of his hotel, but, it's a subject that still engages him.

"I'm not tired of this book at all, I like this book," said the tall, lanky Ford. "It's a big book, it's an ambitious book and it's also the last book I'm going to write about Frank Bascombe, so I want it to be as good as I can get it."

Then he adds, "And this is not as good as I can get it."

Ford intends to work on the manuscript all summer, polishing and revising, to get "The Lay of the Land" closer to the book he wants.

"I want the book to be clear and easy to read about things that are not clear and easy to utter," said Ford, "that's why I'm spending weeks and weeks poring over my sentences."

The book has engaged the writer for nearly four years.

"I had to spend a lot of time in writing this book to think about this book, to think about the things I was writing and whether they are accurate and true," he said. He added that the novel "engages in things I've never engaged before," hence the extra care.

Bascombe, the central figure in "The Sportswriter" (1986) and "Independence Day" (1995), now finds himself at 55 facing his own mortality after a bout of prostate cancer and a collapsing second marriage amid the uncertainty of the 2000 presidential election. Still a real estate agent, he now lives in fictional Sea-Clift, on the New Jersey shore near Toms River.

"A sense of mortality is incumbent on men at 55, and how one deals with morality and aging certainly has a lot to do with my generation, both men and women" said the 62-year-old Ford. "All of the things that aging and mortality mean in a book were certainly things I wanted to undertake."

The time of "The Lay of the Land" is Thanksgiving week as the nation held its breath over the uncertain outcome of the election of a new president.

"I chose this period for the book's time setting quite calculatedly," he explained, "because it was a sort of interregnum when the frame was frozen, in a sense, in America. It seemed like a good time to write a book about an American family. My question was, 'What exactly do we have to be thankful for?' "

Ford said he didn't want to write, probably "couldn't write" a novel about America after Sept. 11, but saw November 2000, less than a year, to be significant period as well.

"I understood that all of the things after 9/11 were going on before 9/11 on a slightly less obvious scale -- bombing, racial unrest, a national fear of the other, dissolution of the family -- they were all quite vividly in everybody's mind then."

Ford said he had no intention of writing a "wide-framed book about America. This is not something that's general in its appeal, but it's fraught with all the issues I'm sensitive to. I see it radiating out to issues that are alive in America, issues about politics, immigration, our racial divide."

A novelist in the traditional sense, Ford is careful to make a distinction between his life and the invented lives of his characters.

"Whenever I've been writing a novel, and I realize that my character thinks something or does something or says something that I done or thought or agreed with, I'm very embarrassed by it, it makes me extremely nervous," he said.

"I feel that I don't have anything to write about, my imagination's basically foundering if I can't make something up that's better than I what I know or do or think."