Richard Ford

After lunch at Dunbar's, [Richard] Ford climbs back in the Jeep to give a quick driving tour of the city; as he passes a particularly seamy-looking housing development, he declares, "There is no street in New Orleans that I wouldn't walk down." He pauses. "But that's not to say that I wouldn't get my ass kicked."

Ford talks a good deal about ass-kicking: He reminisces about the time he foiled a mugging by slamming the hapless thief in the face, and he remembers exchanging punches with a neighbor who refused to keep his dogs from barking, an episode that concluded with Ford in handcuffs and the neighbor in the hospital. At a later point during this interview, while taking a brief walk through the French Quarter, Ford gets into a shouting match with a guy, admittedly a schmucky guy, who is for some reason creeping his car along the sidewalk. The argument begins with Ford calling him a douche bag, continues with the driver asking the Pulitzer Prize winner to lick his balls and ends with Ford making some disparaging comments about the man's mother. "Richard goes directly to his emotions," says Russell Banks, the author of Affliction and Sweet Hereafter and a friend of Ford's. "He comes to full alert whenever anybody acts like an idiot."

from "Ford Tough" by Michael Kaplan, BOOK, March/April 2002

Definition of Story

“A story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves. (Jon Franklin, WRITING FOR STORY, p. 71)

Novel: The Outside World

The Outside World (Tova Mirvis) ***

Several years ago Tova Mirvis' first novel The Ladies Auxiliary was my runner-up for favorite novel of the year. So, when I saw the new novel at the bookstore, I picked it up and my wife and I read it on the drive to Florida and back.

Mirvis' gift is drawing a world that many of us will never see. Her representation is detailed and alive and the reader feels transported, and a part of this strange (to us) culture. At the same time, she captures the universality of individuals and relationships and we see ourselves reflected back from the pages.

The plot seems to unravel a bit at the end but this is common with a novel that has so many characters woven through 250 plus pages. But the plot is almost secondary and the time spent inside the orthodox jewish culture was time well spent.


The Outside World

Throw Another Handful of Characters on the Fire

I remember Virginia Woolf was reviewing a book. . .but one of her complaints was when the author lost his way, he would just throw another handful of characters on the fire. (Novelist/Essayist Joy Williams)

Intellectuals Make People Feel Alienated

"I think something horrible happened in American letters, which is that intellectuals started acting as if other people couldn't understand what they were talking about," adds Mr. Silverblatt, a grad-school dropout whose resume includes such unpoetic occupations as hotel desk clerk, publicist and screenwriter. "That's often true when they're talking about novels and poetry. These are the things we've made. They're our culture. And I think it's a crime when intellectuals make people feel alienated from what is the greatest treasure we have." (Joanne Kaufman quoting "Bookworm" host Michael Silverblatt in the article "A Bibliophile With a Hypnotic Gift of Gab")

Evoking Sensation

"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." (E. L. Doctorow as quoted by Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing")

Seduced by the Language

"The best of good writing will entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in." (from Sol Stein in "Stein on Writing"--Chapter One)