It feels like the same character.
I think it is. But it brought into my gaze something that I had never ever thought of — it isn’t always the case that writing novels will make the writer discover something that he hadn’t ever known before. But one thing it made me think about was just this whole notion of (a) character and (b) how we evolve over the course of our lives. The conceit is that character is a constant and that we are basically just older versions of who we are when we were younger. But I came to believe, having to write a character in three large increments as I did, that that’s just a metaphor, really, that that’s just another kind of accommodation to make life seem more rational. Whereas the person you were when you were 20, even though his name is the same as the person who’s 48, may in fact be entirely different. We know that certain animals go through all kinds of metamorphoses and become entirely different creatures from what they were earlier, and once I started to think about human beings, it kind of freed me in a way. It freed me from the concept of character, and it freed me from the concept of consistency. Particularly in making up the lives of the kids. We don’t know what kids are going to become — it’s one of the great aggravations of parenthood, that we don’t have a clue what our kids are going to become. They may become little monsters, they may become John Gacy. You just don’t know. So when people scratch their heads and say, ‘Gee, he was such a nice little boy,’ and here he is, we’ve discovered that he has all these bodies buried under the floor, and you think how could that be and my point is, well, it could be.
IN CHARACTER: “It isn’t always the case that writing novels will make the writer discover something that he hadn’t ever known before.”
|
We tend to think of novelists as somewhat sedentary. You live in New Orleans and Maine, but here’s all this stuff from New Jersey, and as the newspaper guys say, it’s a story you had to go out and get
.
It’s true. You certainly don’t have to write those stories down there, but for me — and maybe somebody else would do it differently — I had to continually replenish my memory with experience down there, and I did it for the most mercenary of reasons, because I wanted to find more of what I thought were comic details, the names of places, Bump’s Eat It Raw and things like that, I’m so completely tickled by all that stuff, I think it’s hilarious. But I have to go find it.
I know that I drive myself crazy trying to get the specific names of places and things, and I probably drive writers I edit crazy with it too: “Exactly what KIND of sunglasses were they?”
And the reason they don’t do it, aside from inattention, is that I think they don’t understand that those words on a page not only mean something or make something plausible, but they also give pleasure. When you see the word Ray-Ban, that’s hyphenated, somehow my little heart quivers a little bit when I see that. Not only because the real world is verified, but because the word itself is so funny. Writers don’t know that language itself, in and of itself, is pleasure-giving.
Do you read reviews?
No. Particularly when I’m out here on the road I find that the upsie-downsie parts of that are pretty twisting. I think the good ones are never pleasing enough and the bad ones hurt me more than they should. I guess they would say in common parlance: I don’t have good boundaries.
RICHARD FORD | Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St, Brookline | November 16 | $2 | 617.566.6660
ADVERTISEMENT
 |