IT is 8am in the village of East Boothby in Maine, and when novelist Richard Ford looks out of his window he cannot see the ocean for fog. “It’s been pretty hot and when the fog comes in as it is now, it drops about 10 degrees, which is a blessing at this time of year. It’s the one time in the summer when we tend to get a little hot weather and I’m not an enthusiast for hot weather.”

Ford’s house stands on a spit of land, so close to the sea, he says, “I can literally throw a rock in it.” Picturesque East Boothby is a tourist hot-spot in summer, but where he lives, few tourists stray. “For a southerner like I am, to come to New England and way this far north in New England would seem possibly to be anomalous, but it’s exactly what my heart yearned for when I was in Mississippi.”

Speaking by telephone, his languorous southern voice is gravelly and melodious, and a little weary. The day after we speak he and his town planner wife Kristina Hensley are heading to Lima on holiday. He sounds as if he needs it.

Ford’s origins could not be further from the relative coolth and wealth of New England. The writer who, with Philip Roth, could reasonably claim to be the greatest living American novelist, was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the son of Parker Ford, a travelling salesman and his wife Edna Akin. Edna’s own mother was 14 when she was born, but she was married 15 years before falling pregnant with Ford, their only child. “I see myself as an anomaly in their life,” he reflects. In his recent memoir of his parents, Between Them, Ford, 73, draws an intensely vivid, loving and honest portrait of their household, but above all of the people his mother and father were.

Reading this pared-back account, in which he allowed himself little imaginative licence, echoes of Ford’s other books rush to meet the reader. In Frank Bascombe in particular, the beguiling narrator of The Sportswriter series of novels and stories, there are shards of Ford’s own experience, such as his mother’s fatal cancer. It is also tempting to read the fictional death of Bascombe’s young child as a refraction of the terrifying and early death of Ford’s own father, of a heart attack, when his 16-year-old son gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation, to no avail.

Yet for all its moments of grief and pain, and despite his label as one of the “dirty realists”, which group included Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, Ford’s substantial oeuvre is neither miserable nor doom-laden. Independence Day won the Pulitzer prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In this and later works – The Lay Of The Land and Let Me Be Frank With You – Bascombe joins John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman as the most memorable literary characters to come out of America in the last half century. The failed writer turned journalist turned real estate agent is essentially a hopeful, stoical man. And that too can be traced to Ford’s own family.

Between Them is a significant departure from Ford’s other writing, the most personal and revealing he has yet written. At the outset he states that “one of the premier challenges for us all is to know our parents fully”. Asked if, by the book’s end, he felt he had achieved that, he answers flatly: “Not really, no. I only really would be able to, on one hand document and testify to what I did know, and get what I did know all organised and make a sequential narrative of it. And then I was able to discover, which is to say to imagine, a couple of virtues about my parents ... I came to realise that in our little troika of family that I was third, and that was very important to me. And that what my parents did in loving me, was to share with me the love that they had, which was paramount. But they remain, inevitably, people apart. I wouldn’t say that they remain mysterious, they just remain blank slates that only they could have filled in.”

At one point in the book Ford recalls Edna’s fleeting references to the 1930s, before he was born, when she was on the road with Parker, living out of their car. She made these years of the great depression “seem like a long weekend”. Were they more upbeat or optimistic than he is?

“No,” he replies, “I think they would think we are all basically optimists. What they really were – my father was a sweet-tempered man with a really bad temper, and my mother was mouthy and volatile, and I’m all those things, and so we’re just alike, all three of us. I’m the absolutely perfect product of the two, in all of my imperfections and in all of theirs. I think of them as optimistic and forward-thinking.”

Can he trace the influence they have had on his thinking? He pauses, for once not able immediately to answer. “That’s a really hard question. I can answer it only in the most specific ways. I’ve been married 50 years, they were only married –” he does a mental calculation – “32 years. I have never one day questioned loving my wife, and I think my parents never one day questioned loving each other ... They never looked around their love for each other to try to find something better. That is one way that they influenced me. They thought, just as I think, that the family is the laboratory of all moral existence.”

Down to earth, hard-working and fun-loving, Parker and Edna did not appear to have an introspective bone between them. Was there something in the circumstances of his upbringing that explains his imagination?

“Being an only child was a help, and being alone so much. Being around the rather mysterious presence of adults was another thing. Being a failure at most things when I was young also contributed to quite a lot.”

In what way? “Well, a growing sense all through my young life and adolescence of inadequacy and wanting to find something that I could be adequate at. I was very dissatisfied, ashamed of myself as a failure at so many things. But also, I had many transgressions in my life – there was always a discrepancy between what I was doing and what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I’m just a transgressive person.”

He chuckles. “That can be expressed in different ways ... To write into that seam or think into that seam or fantasise into that seam is the first gesture of imagination.”

Ford has written and spoken about the huge hotel of which his grandmother’s husband was manager. Though it’s hard to credit, on occasion Ford’s grandfather would take him to see the corpses of guests in the rooms where they had committed suicide. He also could observe a multitude of lives secondhand, in a way that was rare for one so young. As background for a writer, he laconically admits, “it didn’t hurt”. What seems to have been more important, however, was his unusual childhood, shuttling between relatives because of his father’s frequent absence with work and poor health.

“I could never explain to anyone the circumstances of my life in fewer than 1000 words. People would ask simple questions – where do you go to high school? Where is your home? Everything took a long time to answer. I didn’t like that.”

Such convolutions are found in Ford’s fictional style, in which his sentences roll on like thoughts in search of a full stop, hurtling the reader along with their musical and mesmerising richness. When I remark on the spare manner in which Between Them is written, he replies: “Yeah, well I’m trying to get better.” I tell him that’s not what I’m saying. “No, but I am.”

“Over the course of my life I have written long sentences which are responses to a kind of clutter in the brain. It’s not always wonderful to do that. You get called a stylist and you get called all kinds of euphemistic things. For me the arc of getting older is leading me towards sparer sentences which would be, if I could make them, better sentences, clearer sentences.”

He describes himself as a victim of the New Journalism, when he was for a spell a sports writer. It’s easy to imagine him as a journalist. We met some years ago, for another interview, in Edinburgh. A rangy, courteous man with a quicksilver wit, he has an air of alertness and quickness uncommon among writers. He has charisma, but he does not feel tame. Consequently, I feel obliged to mention a confrontation he had some years ago with a fellow novelist, Colson Whitehead, who in a review sneered at a collection of his stories. It sounded explosive, I say, especially in these seemingly more anodyne literary days, where the rivalry and fireworks of Hemingway or Gore Vidal feel like ancient history. It was even reported that Ford spat on his detractor.

“Yeah, I did,” he says quickly, “Right in his face.” He can no doubt sense my surprise. “What I will tell you, I did not enjoy that. And I didn’t think it was a good thing to do, I just thought it was a necessary thing to do, and the right thing to do, but not good.

“It’s an interesting moment in your life when you realise that being good is not an option, all you can do is what’s right. I don’t step back from it a bit, and I’m not the least bit proud of it. I suffered from doing it maybe more than anybody else. I think it caused people to say bad things about me, and I’m sorry, I don’t want people to say bad things about me, but you have to live with what you are. My view is, if you f*** with me, I’ll f*** with you. If you do me down, I’ll do you down worse. My books are the most important thing that I do. So, that’s the best I can be, and to take the best I can be and rub it in the dirt: sorry, I’m not going to stand by quietly.”

It is a measure of what his work means to him, and of what writing entails and demands.

In the course of our conversation and emails, Ford’s tone suggests a degree of fatalism about his advancing years. “Nothing I know of is physically wrong with me,” he writes, but one senses he is keenly aware that he will not live indefinitely. “Oh, the prospect of not being around long is anything but morbid to me; it’s interesting, really.” As with other big subjects, he treats this, arguably the biggest, as potential material for fiction, handling it with courage and curiosity, the same qualities that make his writing sing. Those, and his unquenchable sense of humour.

Why is it, then, that reviewers make strangely little of the deep vein of wit in his fiction? “I notice that myself. People think that I’m sort of dour. If they knew me well, I’m not dour.”

He describes the Bascombe books as “comic novels”. In his late 30s, he realised he had to include humour in his books. “It wasn’t just humour for its own sake but it was humour in concert with what I thought were the most serious things I knew. I had to figure out a way to create a vessel – which was a novel – which would contain all of that. Because I hadn’t thought I was doing that well enough up to then. My belief is the old line, ‘If nothing’s funny then nothing’s serious’.”

So, in this far from amusing political age, what would Frank Bascombe make of President Trump?

“I don’t know the answer to that, and I guess in some ways I’m negotiating the answer to that on a daily basis. I go on writing Frank Bascombe notes all the time, for a book that I’ll probably never write ...

"All the foolishness and horror and indignity that he is inflicting on us, it hasn’t gotten into my notes. But maybe there’s a way in which what’s got into my notes could be said to reflect him ... But for me, current events have to sink into the ground, and to percolate back up in other formulations, otherwise it’s the province of journalism.”

Regime change, he indicates, has brought worrying times for novelists. “My editor was telling me yesterday that fiction just isn’t selling in the United States. Books are being published and they’re getting good notices, and very few people are buying novels. He was speculating that maybe people are just rapt by what’s going on. Somebody was saying to me yesterday that Trump – of course he’s not a politician and he’s not a leader and he’s not a thinker, but what he is is an entertainer. He’s turned our TV into the White House. People who really like him only see him as entertainment, and there’s only so much space in our lives for one kind of entertainment or another. He’s gobbling up all the time we used to read novels.”

He gives a mirthless laugh. “Not me, I must say. I read more now than I ever used to now that Trump is president. Oh yeah, I hardly ever turn the television on.”

Richard Ford is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 27 and 28 www.edbookfest.co.uk