SOURCE: "A Nomad's Ode to Soffit and Siding," in The New York Times, August 22, 1995, pp. C13, C17.

[In the following interview, Smith talks to Ford about his life, his career, and his novel Independence Day.]

After a lifetime of itinerancy, living in 9 states and some 14 homes, the novelist Richard Ford knows the language of real estate by heart. "I try to be someone upon whom nothing is lost," he said the other day in his present hometown, New Orleans, borrowing a phrase from Henry James.

"Richard watches everything," said his wife, Kristina.

In Independence Day, his sixth work of fiction, Mr. Ford has tapped into the imagination of his contemporaries in their late 40's and early 50's who are obsessed with real estate and the buying and selling of houses. It is a generation for whom real estate has become a metaphor for human fulfillment.

He takes Frank Bascombe, the main character from his third novel, The Sportswriter, and transposes him to another time, about five years later, where, having failed in his career as a writer, he is now selling real estate in Haddam, N.J., a fictional town that bears many similarities to Princeton.

Frank, Charles Johnson wrote in The New York Times Book Review, is "a character we know as well as we know our next-door neighbors. Frank Bascombe has earned himself a place beside Willy Loman and Harry Angstrom in our literary landscape."

He is a survivor of the 1960's and all its enthusiasms. "Holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the 60's is getting hard as hell," Frank muses. In the space of four days over a Fourth of July weekend, he carries on a love affair, longs for his ex-wife and drives his son—a 13-year-old who has been arrested for shoplifting condoms and has taken to barking like a dog in memory of a dead pet—on a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. He also tries to sell a house to an unhappy couple, the Markhams. He has shown them 45, none of them "right." Frank is a forgiving man with a saintly patience.

Mr. Ford makes virtual poetry out of real-estate nomenclature in Independence Day: "1,900 sq. ft. including garage," he writes, in a kind of song, "three-bedroom, two-bath, expandable, no fplc." The words "unsolvable structural enigmas, cast-iron piping with suspicions of lead" take on a gently ominous tone; "grounded wall sockets" and "Ten-four on a 30-year fixed, plus a point, plus an application fee," have a kind of melody. He meditates lovingly on "belvedere," "oriel," "aluminum flashing" and "soffit vent." For Mr. Ford, these are words you can roll your tongue around and relish.

Mr. Ford is 51, tall, with longish, straight, thin gray hair, pale blue eyes and a high domed forehead. At the moment, he owns a town house here with an interior courtyard and a gallery overlooking Bourbon Street; sometimes he works in a room that was part of the residence's old slave quarters. He also owns a bungalow in Montana, where his 1988 collection of short stories, Rock Springs, was set. A native Mississippian, he leases a big white plantation house in the Mississippi Delta as well so he can stay close to his roots.

"Whenever we go to a town," said Mrs. Ford, a 40-year-old urban planner and former model, "Richard really likes to go to the real estate office. We've lived in so many places that our best friends are Realtors."

Mrs. Ford is executive director of the New Orleans City Planning Commission. "Her interests made it seem to me that the business of how land is used is a fit subject for one's concerns," Mr. Ford said.

"Some people think of real estate salesmen as sleazeballs and shysters," he went on. "A profession in which a human being finds shelter for others is in fact important. Real estate agents are in the business of helping us all find ways to realize our dreams."

"I'm also sensitive to the fact that these are desperate human situations," he added. "If you have a balloon mortgage, it's a nightmare!"

At one point in Mr. Ford's book, Frank Bascombe observes, "You don't sell a house to somebody, you sell a life."

It was in 1991, when he had just finished two novellas, that Mr. Ford realized from his notebooks that Frank was speaking to him again. "I was on the sniff of a book," he said. "A feeling about the Northeast overtook me. It seemed fragrant in a way. I took a month and went up to Princeton and rented a room in a bed-and-breakfast."

He had lived in Princeton from 1976 to 1982, while Mrs. Ford was teaching at New York University and Rutgers. He had worked as a sportswriter then and taught writing at Princeton University.

To research Independence Day, he drove around New England and New York State registering his impressions in a tape recorder. He made numerous trips to Cooperstown because "I wanted to see it in different seasons."

"My job as a writer was to find language for that which did not seem to invite it," Mr. Ford said. "To describe Connecticut Route 9 was the challenge of a lifetime. To describe U.S. Route 7 between North Ridgefield and Danbury as seen at night, in the work of a writer, is equal to Edward Hopper painting," he said with a laugh.

Itinerancy is in his blood. His father was a traveling salesman for a starch company, and Mr. Ford was born in the middle of his route, in Jackson, Miss. He grew up across the street from a house where Eudora Welty had lived. When he was little, his mother pointed Ms. Welty out to him: "I could tell from the tone of my mother's voice that being a writer was something estimable."

"Mississippi is very kind to its writers," he said. Today he and Ms. Welty are close friends.

Mr. Ford was an only child. He was also dyslexic. "My mother stood over me and made me learn to read," he recalls. Being dyslexic may even have helped him as a writer: "It makes me pore over words, sound words out in my mind."

The South of his childhood was a culture of "mouthing and punning, a lot of play on words, disrespectful jiving about our elders," he said. "I began to realize how much pleasure there was to language."

When he was 16, his father died, and he spent some time in Little Rock, Ark., with his grandparents. At Michigan State University, he met Kristina Hensley, a daughter of an Air Force pilot who had herself moved every three years. He tried law school but dropped out after less than a year. He went on to study writing with E. L. Doctorow at the University of California, Irvine.

His first two novels were A Piece of My Heart, about the rural South on the cusp of modern life, and The Ultimate Good Luck, about drug dealers in Mexico. All of his novels have a common thread: the men are wry, wistful, vaguely melancholy, the women viewed mostly through the prism of the men's needs.

The two books were not commercially successful. "The first two novels didn't go into paperback at a time when you could put snow tires into paperback," he said. "I felt they were as good a books as I could write; this is the world talking to you!" So in 1981, he decided to "hang it up."

"I wasn't downcast," he said. "I don't take being a writer for granted." He wrote for Inside Sports but lost the work when the magazine was sold. He was still living in Princeton, and "I thought, 'What am I going to do?' Maybe write a book about a guy who's a sportswriter." The Sportswriter, set in New Jersey, was written in Montana after the Fords left Princeton.

"Richard always writes backward," said Mrs. Ford, who plays an integral part in his work. After finishing a novel, he sometimes reads the entire work aloud to her, though Independence Day, a 700-page manuscript, was too long for that.

They even go bird hunting together. "We spoil each other," he said of their relationship. Still, he often spends weeks apart from his wife so he can concentrate. "When Kristina walks into the room, everything changes. I have to get up and see what she's doing. I have to erect a barricade around myself."

They have no children. "I'm not crazy about kids," he said. "It's easier to imagine them than to raise them yourself." But in Frank Bascombe's son, Paul, Mr. Ford has imagined an awkward, rude, unwashed teen-ager with vividness. "The condition of 15-year-olds in American culture is not a secret," he said. "It's in the American air."

For the moment, Independence Day has emptied Mr. Ford's novelistic reservoir, so he is writing a screenplay. Next winter he plans to write a novella and an essay about his father. "If I could find something else to do, I could not do it," he says of his writing. "Nothing is promised to me."