interesting you know on the i have a kind of a working theory about not only my own life but yours and frank bascombe stew which is to which is what i call oppositional thinking so i would try to if i were writing about frank and trump i would try to find something provocative for him to say. richard ford has never made any secret of his dislike for the current u.s. president but he says the reasons that his country and perhaps the entire world is so divided go far beyond donald trump. was there too many people. a lot of those people don't have anything and they're living in places where they don't have enough food and the they don't have any education and but they've all got cell phones and they've all got t.v.'s and they can very easily see that you notice right up here the other side of the ocean there are a lot of people who have been a lot better than we are why is that that doesn't seem fair it isn't fair and so what why are we divided we're divided about what we should do about those people those people who don't live in our country but who have a right to succeed and who have a right to thriv

so let's focus on frank bascombe instead he's seen as a typical american every man a character in which everyone can recognize some aspect of themselves but ford says not true there is no such thing that's just something some cockamamie critic dreams up. he's a very specific man he's he says he's a divorced me he's a he's a father of 3 children he takes a job he lives in new jersey he could hardly be any more specifically i mean here is the notion that every man is a as far as a concerned a misguided idea. asks us to generalize about people in ways that blurs the individual i mean literature invites us to see people in particular you know we can only do good in particular we can only do bad in particular so that's what i'm interested in i'm not interested in seeing the world from outer space subspaces eternity that is to want to see people that way. the melancholy character frank bascombe travels throughout his country observing thinking about and commenting on the disasters that befall it but the public and the private but he doesn't take anything or anyone too seriously nor does he le