Characteristics of Richard Ford’s works

I always hesitate to judge whether any attitude, person, behavior, character, experience, or belief is quintessentially American. When I was abroad, some people who had read my works asked me whether a certain story was quintessentially American. I was speechless for a moment. Then I said: If you take a helicopter and fly over the suburbs of a certain city in the United States, you see a man wearing a pie hat mowing the lawn. This should certainly be a typical American. But who is he? (We thought we knew the answer.) We looked closer, gently took the hat off his head, and discovered he was Pakistani, an immigrant, and maybe a third-generation Ghanaian or Chinese-American. His life's trajectory, his appearance on this lawn in this town on this day, not only shattered most notions of typicality but also revealed the tendency for unconventional qualities to be downplayed and excluded. It can be seen that personality proves the unreliability of sex. This is exactly what a large number of famous literary works strive to describe: the closer you get, the clearer you can see. This is how we should be.

Whether my experience of growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s was more quintessentially American than the life of this Pakistani immigrant is, of course, open to debate. But I am an American just like him. Our experiences are all experiences of life in America, or part of it: the ups and downs (in my case), the complexities and contradictions of citizenship, national belonging and the regionalisms that divide us. None of this fits neatly into a grand political ideal. This ideal is tolerant while trying to prevent people from being suppressed and constrained as much as possible. (Maybe I should admit that I have more in common with this immigrant than I thought.

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