[In the following essay, Blades discusses Ford's novel Independence Day and asserts that Ford's "migratory habits have only enriched his life and fiction."]

By loose definition, Richard Ford is a displaced writer, but his migratory habits have only enriched his life and fiction. For one thing, they relieved him of the need to do extensive research for his latest novel, Independence Day.

The book's central character, Frank Bascombe, is a real estate agent, an occupation with which the 51-year-old Ford has acquired a more than passing familiarity over the decades, as he moved from Mississippi to New Jersey to Montana to Louisiana, with various intermediate stops.

By lighting out every couple of years for a new territory, Ford has been able to diversify, to "learn and write about the whole country." In the process, said the novelist, who was briefly in Chicago this week to promote his new book, he has also avoided the regional stereotyping that handicaps so many fiction writers.

Of his nomadic life, Ford said: "I haven't bought very many houses, but I've looked at a jillion. And when I started Independence Day, I discovered how much I knew about real estate. I guess it's a habit of being a writer. You just begin to soak stuff up."

Selling houses represents a dramatic career change for Frank Bascombe, who was "The Sportswriter" in Ford's 1986 novel of that title. For the sequel, Independence Day, Ford decided to retire Frank from sportswriting and immerse him in real estate.

Next to sportswriting, selling houses sounds like a resoundingly dull business, hardly the stuff of lively or sympathetic fiction. But Ford disagrees, calling real estate "an index to our national character…. As Frank says, a large portion of every American's life is spent in the company of realtors."

Ford's faith in his ability to invigorate not only the subject but also his fictional characters was largely affirmed by the reviews for Independence Day. Perhaps the most positive was the one in Publishers Weekly, which called the novel "often poetic, sometimes searing, sometimes hilarious."

Though well-grounded in the fundamentals of real estate, Independence Day is more concerned with Frank Bascombe's psyche than his occupation. The novel catches him six years after the close of The Sportswriter, still living in Haddam, N.J., still troubled by his divorce and the death of a son from Reye's syndrome.

As the title indicates, Ford's long, introspective novel takes place over a Fourth of July weekend. During the holiday, Frank compulsively meditates on his "psychic detachment" and the nature of personal independence, while embarking on an inglorious pilgrimage with his surviving teenage son to the basketball and baseball halls of fame.

Although he has never sold real estate, Ford did spend a year as a sportswriter with Inside Sports magazine, beginning in 1980. At the time, his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, though generously received, was out of print, leaving him in need of a regular income, said the author (whose 1995 income got a welcome boost with the $25,000 Rea Award for short fiction).

When the magazine was sold, Ford was out of a job, but his brief inning as a sportswriter provided him with the raw material for a novel. As a number of reviewers pointed out, The Sportswriter, with its consuming focus on moral and spiritual issues rather than physical action, tried to do for sports what Walker Percy's The Moviegoer did for movies.

At various places in Independence Day, Frank Bascombe expresses his preference for real estate transactions over sportswriting, which offers at best, he says, "a harmless way to burn up a few unpromising brain cells." Ford may tacitly endorse that sentiment, but not so eagerly that he'd ever apply for a real estate agent's license. "Given a choice," he said, "I'd still probably want to be a sportswriter."

A native of Jackson, Miss., who grew up in Eudora Welty's neighborhood, Ford naturally used the South as background for his first novel. Since then, he has deliberately avoided the region in his fiction, setting subsequent books in places like Mexico (The Ultimate Good Luck) and Montana (Wildlife, Rock Springs) as well as New Jersey.

Before he settled in New Orleans five years ago, Ford was called "America's most peripatetic fiction writer." By one interviewer's tally, he and his wife, Kristina, had lived in a dozen places in 22 years, with Chicago; St. Louis; Princeton, N.J.; Missoula, Mont.; and Oxford and Cahoma, Miss., among their many transient postmarks.

According to Ford, the chief reason he has traveled around so much is not to satisfy his own literary wanderlust so much as accommodate the career moves of his wife, an urban planner currently employed by the City of New Orleans. "We're not really migratory," Ford said. "She just goes places for a better job, and I take my work along with me."

For all its dark threads, Independence Day is a hopeful novel. Taking inventory of all his misfortunes, Frank Bascombe concludes that he's "still as close to day-to-day happy as I could be…. I made one promise to myself, and that was that I'd never complain about my life, and just go on and try to do my best, mistakes and all."

Although Ford distances himself from Frank in other matters, he does admit to sharing his resilient optimism. "Writing a book is an optimistic gesture," he said, "because it presumes that people will have the time to read it and that it will have a good effect on them."