Richard Ford revives his Pulitzer Prize-winning creation

This, says Frank, is "in the belief that life is a matter of gradual subtraction, aimed at a solider, more-nearly-perfect essence... Better to strip things down and where better to start stripping than the words we choose to express our increasingly rare, increasingly vagrant thoughts."

Among the words and phrases he would like to evict from the lexicon are "awesome" (when it only means "tolerable"), "bond", "hydrate" (when it just means "drink"), "make art", "reach out" and "noise" used as a verb. The F-word, however, is still "pretty serviceable" as noun, verb or adjective.

Now aged 68 and retired from his job as a real estate agent, the droll and genial Frank sometimes returns to this theme in the four novellas that make up the book, which is set in the quiet New Jersey suburb of Haddam, familiar from Ford's superb Bascombe trilogy, but in the wake of the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Intimations of mortality and an undertow of melancholy suffuse the stories, as well as illness, the fragility of life and love, and racial tensions. The writing is excellent: idiosyncratic, playful and irreverent. It's also very, very funny.

In the opening story, Frank, who used to be a writer, says: "Language imitates the public riot, the poet said. And what's today's life like if not a riot." Certainly, the incomparable 70-year-old Ford's work is a riot. I tell him how Frank's riffs on the usage and abusage of the English language made me laugh, particularly the dreaded "awesome", recently revealed in a survey as having taken over from "marvellous". We bemoan this sad fact, then Ford says: "Frank has, of course, been a realtor. Their mantra is location, location, location. Frank's is locution, locution, locution."

Ford, a courtly mannered, gently spoken, dry witted Mississippian, who despite being dyslexic has published seven novels, four collections of short stories and numerous non-fiction essays, is speaking from his rooms in Trinity College, Dublin, where he stays regularly in his capacity as a professor of creative writing. Home is on the coast of Maine, where he lives with his wife Kristina - they met when he was 19, she 17 - and their several hunting dogs.

Finishing each of the Bascombe novels - The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay Of The Land (2006) - made the author sick. "It had gotten more and more nerve-racking, almost driving me crazy, particularly the final book, The Lay Of The Land. Like Frank, I ended up in hospital with lots of somatic and psychosomatic maladies," he says, adding that he's fine now and likes being the age he is. "Everything's still in working order; I have a great life. I'm at peace with myself."

Eight years ago, he announced he was finished with Frank. So why resurrect him, even if he is one of the most memorable characters in American literature, on a par with Updike's iconic "Rabbit" Angstrom?

Let Me Be Frank With You is not a Frank Bascombe novel, Ford insists. "Sure, I said I'd never write another book about him. But I guess I lied! I meant that I would never write another 200,000-word novel about him. The new book is four longish Frank Bascombe stories, set in the fictive aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the terrible storm that wrecked so much of life on the mid-Atlantic seaboard in the United States in early autumn 2012. I don't usually write fiction about contemporary events, but Kristina and I had lived in New Orleans in 2005 and saw the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

"We helped to build houses and were very much involved there. Kristina has a doctorate in urban planning so she worked for ACORN [the community organisation which campaigns in the city on behalf of low-income and working-class families]. After Sandy occurred, we went down there and spent a long time amid the wreckage on the New Jersey Shore, setting for many of Frank's adventures. On the way back to New York from New Jersey, I remember thinking, 'Gosh, I've seen something that I would actually like to have Frank Bascombe narrate.'

"My head was full of crushed houses and lives strewn together in the wreckage. I could hear Frank's voice - again. His word choices, his rhythms, his humours, his sense of right and wrong. But they're comic stories, comic in the old sense, that if nothing's funny, nothing's serious, hence the book's funny title, because these stories are about those aspects of the aftermath of the calamity that would not be noticeable in the public press. Most things in the book I play for some kind of joke.

"To me, if nothing's funny, nothing's serious. Henry James said that the great theme of the world is the connection between bliss and bale, between things that help and things that hurt. I'm just never satisfied if something I've written is not a little bit funny."

Frank - a sort of American everyman - is certainly funny, so much so that Ford's readers missed him desperately. They've seen him suffering the death of a child, divorcing, remarrying, getting shot and surviving prostate cancer. Small wonder then that as Ford promoted his acclaimed, bestselling, post-Bascombe novel, the marvellous Canada (2012), he was for ever being asked to reconsider not writing about Frank again, "which struck a tender nerve".

Readers would also always ask what Frank - who is most definitely not a self-portrait or, indeed, Ford's alter ego - is "doing" when the novelist is not around. "He's not doing anything, I tell them. I have to be there for him to be at all. He's not my 'child' - actually, I don't much care for children."

In fact, Ford and his wife have no children. He and Kristina, who married in 1968, did not want them. He vividly recalls the moment he told her he didn't want a family. "She said, 'Thank God, neither do I.' It's the smartest single thing I ever did, other than marrying her," he says of their decision. "For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. We just didn't think we'd be good parents. I work hard in my writing life; I take it seriously. Although if I hadn't married the girl I did, I'd have been a ruin. It was complete luck we met."

Kristina is his first reader, although they never read his reviews. Because of his dyslexia, which he reckons makes him a good listener as he listens so intently to what people say, he reads aloud the work he's done each day to Kristina. "Every day! It took me five weeks to read Canada to her. I think that reading out loud causes the sentences to be simpler than they would if I hadn't spoken them."

Canada is widely regarded as Ford's masterpiece - oh, the irony that the great American novel might be so titled, although had his publishers had their way it would have been called Saskatchewan. The luminous Canada opens with an arresting sentence, which Irish writer John Banville reckons is destined to go straight into the collective literary memory, telling us what we and Dell, the 16-year-old narrator, are in for: "First, I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

"I'd been thinking about this novel for 20 years," Ford reveals. "I had been making notes, which I kept in a bag in the freezer." The freezer? "Sure, we have dogs. And, as anyone who lives with dogs and cats will tell you, they destroy things. As Kristina always says, 'When you live with animals, you don't live good.'

"I have a terrible temper so I didn't want to lose it or the notes for Canada, which I always knew was about a 16-year-old boy going across the Canadian border to Saskatchewan. Over the years I'd even written a few notes about Frank, too."

So that's what Bascombe was "doing"; he was in cryogenic sleep? Ford laughs.

Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, as an only child Ford was adored. When he was 16 years old, his father suffered his second heart attack. "He died in my arms," recalls the author. "It was tumultuous." His distraught mother sent him to live with his grandfather in the 600-room hotel he owned and where there were several suicides. "My grandfather would always show me the dead bodies and other things a boy should not have seen! Good training for a writer."

When Ford was 18, he enrolled at Michigan State University, where he discovered literature. Reading led to writing. "Not such a great leap," he suggests.

"I left Mississippi because I was on the wrong side of the race issue. I was not anything more than a moderate kind of guy. Around me there was a lot of absurd racism and I knew if I stayed I was going to get sucked into something that would be bad one way or the other. I'm a southerner, I am helpless not to write about race. I wrote about it in Independence Day [which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkener Award for Fiction, the first time in American history the same book won both] and in The Lay Of The Land."

For a decade Ford combined writing with law school, teaching and a stint with the US Marines. He wrote two "mildly received novels", which didn't sell, so he became a sports writer. The magazine he worked for folded and he began writing a novel about an ex-novelist-turned-sports writer. Alongside Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, Ford became part of the "dirty realist" genre. "Marketing tactics!" he exclaims.

So what has he got stashed in the freezer now?

"For years, I've been making notes for a memoir of my father - I've already written a long essay about my mother - but I couldn't find a way into it. Recently, though, I read Michael Ondaatje's memoir; he's a writer I greatly admire. He writes that he never had an adult conversation with his father. I never had such a conversation with my father either and I mourn that fact, but finally I think I've found a way to write about a man I loved very much."

Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford is published by Bloomsbury, priced £18.99