Once upon a time there was a rule about literature: it could only be written about the great figures of the world. That’s for thousands of years poetry and plays only featured gods, mythic heroes, members of the royal family, war heroes, and other various assorted representatives of that class of society far above the lowly farmers, merchants, and animal breeders. Things have changed quite a bit since then and today it is not unusual to entire novels or short story collections in which the character at the highest level of society is a bartender or late night desk clerk at a run-down motel or even—at best—a down on his luck insurance salesman about two solid sales away from being fired or a corrupt sheriff in a backwater town in Montana.
That the state of characterization has reached this point in modern literature is due in no small part to writers like Richard Ford. He is a member of that group of authors to show up with increasingly frequently in the latter half of the 20th century who were even willing to go the next step and jettison the “average Joe” characters populating the short fiction of writers like the two Johns: Updike and Cheever. While their characters lived upper middle class existences which seemed to deny the potential for myth and nobility that had marked the conventions of literary tradition for millennia and while those characters certainly had their share of problems, at least they usually possessed the respectability of being able to afford to experience those problems in suburbia back that word really meant something.
Writers like Raymond Carver and Ford did away with even that last vestige tying what type of people are suitable for writing about back to the ancients. Let it be understood, however, that there is a significant difference between the losers aimlessly drifting through life in Ford’s stories the low-lifes populating pulp fiction. For the most part, Ford doesn’t write about bad people with evil intentions. Some may be criminals, but often that is simply the result of inequitable economics finally catching up with their natural tendency toward aimless drifting. Literature has always had its fair share of villains who represent the dregs of society—Iago is not much more than a grifter who got lucky—but they represent something different from Ford is working at. Ford’s characters who are on the downside of society are the protagonists.
If not necessarily heroes, they definitely are not the villains. This is their life and Ford presents that existence in all its unromantic lack of mythic nobility for what it is without judgment. It in the end, it is ultimately this aspect of his writing—presenting a world and the kind of characters who in other stories would be either overly romanticized antiheroes, outright villains or, most likely, nameless rabble—as simply being just like the rest of us that is the subversive contribution to the history of literature for which he will be remembered.
