ONE OF the magical pleasures of reading fiction is finding a writer who has recreated the landscape of our own upbringing. As natives of Tyrone and Leitrim know so well from the work of Ben Kiely and John McGahern, such a discovery deepens the already intimate experience of reading stories, and intensifies the feeling, so important in literature, that aspects of our own lives have been distilled and presented in a way that is personal and indelible, writes Kevin Stevens
Like so many, I discovered the American writer Richard Ford in the mid-1980s, when he published The Sportswriter, a novel with a voice - sad, wistful, funny - that captured perfectly the spirit of that drifting decade as the book's narrator, Frank Bascombe, struggled to articulate his emotions about past tragedy and present purgatory in the suburban town of Haddam, New Jersey.
But it was a number of short stories that Ford published in the New Yorker and Granta around the same time, collected in his book Rock Springs, that really caught my attention, not just because they too had unique, convincing voices weaving tales of sadness and loss, but also because they were set in and around a place very different from New Jersey: my hometown of Great Falls, Montana.
I was living in Boston at the time, distant in every sense from where I'd grown up, and reading these stories - including one entitled Great Falls - was like going home in the company of a wise old friend, someone acquainted with the charm and grandeur of Montana but not afraid to reveal the loneliness and violence of many of the people living there. Like all good stories, they were remarkably familiar, and yet surprising, with a new perspective on what I had known for so long.
Ford's Montana is a place of small towns with names like Victory and Sunburst, set amid wheat stubble and empty benchland, where the pretence of plain speech masks a failure in many of its inhabitants to explain why the world has not turned out the way they expected. Many of his stories are set in the 1960s, the years of my youth, when the post-war decline of rural America had reached crisis point and a western state like Montana had become marginalised in many fundamental ways.
Ford is not a native Montanan. Born in Mississippi, educated in Michigan, he has lived all over the US, from California, to Louisiana, to his current home in Maine. Writers with a narrow definition of "territory" often claim we have to be born and raised in a place to understand it. Ford's work proves otherwise. His is a grander vision, and he approaches setting as an American, with the whole land as his for the taking. New Orleans, Connecticut, the Grand Canyon, New York City - each Ford location is rendered with exact detail and linked carefully to the characters who inhabit it. His sense of place is meticulously local but connected to a larger, national meaning that makes him one of America's most important writers.
After reading Ford for 20 years, I got the chance to meet him when he read from his work at the Abbey Theatre last June. Before a packed house, he read the powerful, meditative opening of his latest novel, The Lay of the Land - and, to my surprise and delight, one of his Great Falls stories, Optimists, an exploration of family disintegration and adolescent disillusion, with an opening sentence that Frank O'Connor would have been proud of: "All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only 15 years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back."
After the reading, Ford signed a book for me and graciously tolerated my near hero An Irishman's Diary-worship. He made time for a long chat and told me of plans to visit Montana in the summer. We spoke of duck-hunting, the Irish in Butte, and his 1990 novel Wildlife, also set in Great Falls. With a smile he said he planned to spend more time in Ireland.
Sure enough, he returned in November to deliver the inaugural talk in University College Cork's Frank O'Connor Lectures. Then last week he spoke at the launch of Sixteen After Ten, a collection of pieces by students of the M.Phil. in creative writing at Trinity's Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing. Philip St John, one of the book's contributors, told me at the launch that Ford had spent two weeks with the students, giving them direction and close analysis that was, like his prose, both precise and subtle.
The recent news that Ford will continue this association with the Trinity programme is very welcome. His appointment as adjunct professor and his residence in the college at various times during the year will be a great boost to the developing writers enrolled in this degree. If Ford can impart to them even a small measure of his mastery in creating voice and place, then we can look forward to a new generation of writers prepared for the challenge of capturing the mystery of where we are from.