Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very honored to have as my guest, Richard Ford.

His newest novel is The Lay of the Land, published by Knopf.

It is the third book in a trilogy of books that began with a sports writer. The second book was Independence Day. And now you've been with Frank Bascom, the hero of these books, for how many years?

25. So you know something that very few other writers and very few living writers know. What is it like to inhabit

a character for that long? Well, I don't know if that's the word I would use, inhabit it,

and indeed, over the course of three books, I have written other books in between.

And so it's more a matter of, first of all, going and fetching something that you think you used to have,

which is to say a measuring voice, which is Frank's voice for me.

And it's more projecting it.

You know, Graham Green said that writers are people who impersonate other people.

And so that's what I think I do without the notion of inhabiting.

For me, it's more important to make something a character or narrative arc that's separate

from myself, that I kind of operate sort of at arm's length a bit.

I sometimes think it's like, it's like Bergen and Charlie, you know, I've got my hand,

I've got my hand in his back and I'm making him say these things

and making his head move and making him respond, but never fully getting in signed.

...