Author of a dozen works of fiction, including Rock Springs (1987), Wildlife (1990) and Canada (2012), Ford has forged his remarkable career by imagining the inner lives of characters whose fates turn on quiet moments. Readers of this work may think, first and foremost, of Frank Bascombe, narrator of the critically acclaimed quartet that commences with The Sportswriter (1986) and includes Independence Day (1995), the first novel to receive both the PEN/Faulkner Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ford begins his latest with a remembrance of his father, Parker, a travelling salesman for the Faultless Starch Company. Parker’s route consisted of cities and towns in the Deep South. One of the feats of this slim and moving book is Ford’s vivid imagining of the life his parents shared before his birth. Another is the way he captures the rhythms of that ‘far-off and unknowable place’ they inhabited, namely the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In that era, Parker sold a single product, starch, sometimes with Edna and Richard waiting for him in the parked company car. Before his arrival, however, Ford’s parents drove those southern roads alone, with Edna sitting next to Parker on the front seat. He portrays their nomadic lives in hotel rooms and the love that sustained them long after his advent (‘a mixed blessing’, he writes), which kept Edna longing each week for Parker’s return to Jackson, Mississippi, where the family eventually settled and young Richard grew up across the street from the great Southern writer Eudora Welty.

‘To write a memoir and to consider the importance of another human being is to try to credit what might otherwise go unremarked – partly by acknowledging that mysteries lie within us all, and by identifying within those mysteries, virtues,’ Ford writes. ‘Once more, it’s not so different from what we find when we read a story by Chekhov, nor is it probably very different from the problem any son faces when thinking about and estimating his parents. The truest life, of course, is always the life that’s lived.’

Ford renders these two memoirs in tender yet unsentimental prose. He doesn’t omit details of failings or fights. Of Parker, he writes, ‘He was in most ways not a dexterous or skillful man, but in the art of being loved he possessed a talent – which surely is a virtue worth noting, one that confers benefits superior to most.’

Until now, Ford has proven most adept in Chekhov’s art of compression in his short novel Wildlife and the three novellas collected in Women with Men (1997). He fills the slim Between Them with memorable moments, the kind which at once invite readers into the world he experienced as a child in the mid-century American South and also to examine their own lives and the memories that shape us and tell us who we have become. Early in the section about his mother, Ford remembers a time when he was ‘nine or seven or five’ and a neighbor asked ‘who I was’.

[W]hen I said my name – Richard Ford – she said, ‘Oh, yes. Your mother’s that cute little black-haired woman up the street.’ These were words that immediately affected me, and strongly, since they proposed my first conception of my mother as someone else, as someone whom other people saw and considered and not just as my mother.

Richard Ford (Wikimedia Commons)Parker Ford, failing in health as he set out each week for business on the road, died at home in his teenaged son’s arms. Edna lived on for several decades. Her story, written thirty years before the memoir about his father, closes the book. ‘The act of considering my mother’s life is an act of love,’ Ford writes. ‘In myself I see her, hear her laugh in mine. In her life there was no brilliance, no celebrity. No heroics. no one, crowning achievement to swell the heart.’

In Between Them, Ford finds the dignity and grace in all that goes unnoticed and to which literature holds to the light and gives permanence. It is a deep, rich imagining of the emotional world of Edna and Parker Ford, a hymn to memory and love and the dramas that erupt across what appear, on the surface, to be the most quiet of lives.