SOURCE: "House Calls," in Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1995, p. 9C.

[In the following essay, Blades discusses Ford's novel Independence Day and asserts that Ford's "migratory habits have only enriched his life and fiction."]

By loose definition, Richard Ford is a displaced writer, but his migratory habits have only enriched his life and fiction. For one thing, they relieved him of the need to do extensive research for his latest novel, Independence Day.

The book's central character, Frank Bascombe, is a real estate agent, an occupation with which the 51-year-old Ford has acquired a more than passing familiarity over the decades, as he moved from Mississippi to New Jersey to Montana to Louisiana, with various intermediate stops.

By lighting out every couple of years for a new territory, Ford has been able to diversify, to "learn and write about the whole country." In the process, said the novelist, who was...