Like an old friend reviewing his life, sitting with a glass of whiskey in a lost bar in Mississippi, Richard Ford writes this essay with ease and simplicity, making it easy even for the most distracted reader to follow. At 81 years old, the man behind Independence Day looks back on what has occupied much of his life: writing. In Plain Words, a brief essay that inaugurates the Feltrinelli Lectures, is a kind of personal balance on the craft, literature, and the reasons that explain a career of almost half a century. But there is a question that organizes the book and is especially interesting: are his novels political? Ford recalls that for years he rejected that possibility. His stories, populated by ordinary individuals and focused on their intimate conflicts, did not intend to convey an ideology or function as thesis novels. However, over time he understands that every private life is crossed by the society in which it develops. Narrating those men and women, their desires, losses, and small aspirations, also means portraying an era. Politics, then, does not need to break into the novel: it can be there, silently, in the conditions that determine the existence of its characters. Ford’s greatest merit lies precisely in defending that literature attentive to the particular. For him, any political dimension loses value if it is not supported by high-quality writing. Before giving answers, the novel must observe, ask, and try to understand human complexity. It is a conception consistent with the realism he has developed since The Sportswriter and, especially, with the Frank Bascombe saga. In Plain Words does not, however, reach the greatness of his best fictions. At times it is repetitive and some reflections seem less profound than its premise promises. Even so, its serene, honest, and stripped tone turns these pages into an attractive intellectual self-portrait. More than a treatise on literature, it is the conversation of a great novelist with himself about why it is still worth writing.
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