by JULIET WATERS

When I spoke to Richard Ford last Friday evening, the wind was tossing around wet sheets of rain, ice coated the trees and the power was going out all over the city. There was a good chance he might not make it out of Montreal to continue his book tour. Fine by me. The 62-year-old native of Mississippi, who now lives in Maine, is charming, open and seems to be close personal friends with just about every major American and Canadian writer you mention. But in the end, it’s a good thing he made it to LaGuardia airport. Last week, The Lay of the Land (the sequel to the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day) was picked by The New York Times as one of the top five works of fiction of 2006.

Mirror: So congratulations on the New York Times list. What’s that like?

Richard Ford: I’m happy. But I’m especially happy for my publisher. Because the part that I take the greatest pleasure from is writing it.

M: Joyce Carol Oates once wrote something about how, in novel writing, the satisfaction is in the effort, not in the rewards—if there are any.

RF: She’s exactly right. Not to say that the rewards aren’t satisfying. But the satisfaction in the rewards is far outside your control. The satisfaction you get from writing is much more in your control. Joyce, by the way, is one of my very closest friends. She’s really dear to me. It makes me happy to hear she thinks that, because she spends a lot of time in the middle of things. But the other thing about The New York Times is that it means that people are reading the book. That makes a difference to me. I wouldn’t write a book at my advanced age if I believed nobody was going to read it. You can get away with that when you’re a kid. But when you know you can write it, getting through books is not the trick. Getting them to be the best they can be becomes the real effort. And also, with this book, I knew that there was a certain readership already—so I wanted to make it worth their effort.

M: In this novel, Frank [Bascombe, the hero of this, Independence Day and an earlier novel, The Sportswriter] is going through what he calls “The Permanent Period.” Can you explain that?

RF: The Permanent Period is the period that, after you’re dead, you’ll be remembered for. The past is becoming distinct and the future—there’s not that much left of it, so you can’t really screw it up. So what that should confer is a certain freedom to be who you are and quit becoming, and to be and to be more vividly. That’s what I think—I mean, I’m 62 and I feel exactly the way I felt when I was your age.

M: It’s funny, I heard Deborah Eisenberg say almost exactly the same thing last weekend on Writers & Company.

RF: Well, Wally [actor Wallace Shawn, Eisenberg’s longtime partner] would make anybody feel young. He’s such a delight. And she is too. Now can you explain to me why she’s not on the New York Times five best books list [for her collection of short stories Twilight of the Superheroes]! When I saw that the National Book Awards didn’t even have her on the shortlist, I thought, ‘What the...!!’

M: Do you think it’s because there’s a bias against short stories?

RF: No. No I don’t think so. Because she’s a major short story writer. She’s a major talent. And she just gets short shrift all the time. And at her age, she isn’t going to write a lot more books. It takes her a hell of a long time to write a book as it is. It just infuriates me. And then these dinkyass books that get put on this list, you know... Ridiculous! Ridiculous.

The Lay of The Land by Richard Ford, Knopf Canada, hc.