Richard Ford c/d

i just finished "the lay of the land" and am very sad now that it's over. i drank it in big gulps. i've never read anyone with such a fierce eye for the details of america's benighted suburban landscape. the only thing i was confused by was the difference between "the next level" and "the permanent period" - they seemed to be sort of the same?

i read 'independence day' a couple of years ago and fell in love with it completely. am currently swinging between 'the sportswriter' and celine's 'journey to the end of the night'. have you read his short story collection called 'rock springs'?

I've used "Great Falls" several times in my undergraduate lit class; okay, but overdetermined.

man i love his short stories, rock springs in particular. but i never managed to finish the sportswriter. in that american male vein of very well-written and well-observed fiction about not terribly interesting people. i did read an excerpt from lay of the land (probably in the new yorker) and liked it a lot, which confirmed for me that i like him in small doses. i saw him read once too, and he's a good, dramatic reader. worth the ticket if he ever comes around.

Stylistic chameleon.

He is -- he can shift from the Carver-esque soft boil of Rock Springs and attempt a Richard Yates-style lyricism in Women With Men.

he gave a talk here in nz recently, which i was so excited to go to - but i had so much stressful shit going on that i completely lost track of the date. totally disappointed. i hear he's got a sexy voice.

i really disliked the end of "the lay of the land" but it was a small disappointment next to the sumptuous, slow-moving detail of the rest of the book. (i feel he avoids all the difficulty that the book has been generating and pointing to up to that moment. he just punts, basically, the way an unimaginative film script does. i guess he felt like he needed an honest-to-god climax, but i think it let the rest of it down.)

"i hear he's got a sexy voice."

he has a very cool voice! sounds like he's gargling marbles from a southern rock quarry. or possibly polishing them. everything he says is very slow and deliberate and biblical and wonderfully worded. like faulkner come to life.

i can't read his books. despite his obvious talents i find his writing tedious and sorta terrible.

Read Independence Day a while back and was unimpressed. Then picked up a used Sportswriter just recently, and it was pretty awesome. Read it slowly, and just finished it. So I went back and tried Independence Day again, and still found it dull.

Not sure why. They seem like two entirely different types of books, even though there's obviously the same writer, same style, and even same structure to both. I don't really see the Frank of one becoming the Frank of the other. Don't see the themes of one translating even to the themes of the other.

Sportswriter felt very tight and focused on a particular sort of experience and meaning. The brief detour into academia was one of a few very neatly executed set pieces, and there seemed to be a great deal going on with the language, toward a purpose and effect. Independence Day, by comparison, feels very flat and conventional. The language is more crafted, but feels like there's little payoff.

Anyway, any pointers to good articles on the dude? Also, will LoL be closer to Sportswriter or ID territory (I fear the latter)?

Just read "Wildlife". Bought it - a 2006 edition - based on its cover and a quote suggesting "Hemingway updated and outwritten by a bleak but kindly master of simple words that speak volumes."