Rather than lamenting what has been lost in the technocratic, postwar world, Ford values what remains, refusing to accept the disappearance of human will and agency. As he told Gregory L. Morris in 1994: "Not that you can always be responsible for what happens to you. But you can try to be. I've always disliked the sense of disempowerment." Ford presents an optimistic picture of human endeavor. His characters, especially in his later works, do their best with the options available in a world of strip malls, small towns, and interstate highways. Ford's fiction chronicles the human imagination striving to conceive a better life with the often scanty resources provided by society. In a 1998 interview with Huey Guagliardo, Ford connects this striving with the phrase "secular redemption," explaining that "what we are charged to do as human beings is to make our lives and the lives of others as livable, as important, as charged as we possibly can." Ford's fiction records the success or failure of various characters to live up to this humanist imperative.
Ford rejects categorization of his work, and the many critical pigeonholes in which it has been placed indicate that his writing covers a wide band of the realist spectrum.
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