'My name is Frank Bascombe. I am a sportswriter." Already these few words - the first two sentences, the first paragraph, of Richard Ford's 1985 novel The Sportswriter - are among the most familiar lines in 20th-century American literature. Their down-to-earth simplicity makes them an ideal start to a book about the ordinary sort of guy we shall be befriending over the next few hundred pages. No less appropriate to the character is his name. But why Bascombe?

Opportunity to ask the question presented itself last Thursday when the Pulitzer Prize-winning author came to the QI Club, in Turl Street, to read from and talk about his latest novel. The Lay of the Land (Bloomsbury, £17.99) completes the trilogy begun with The Sportswriter. (Independence Day, for which he won the Pulitzer, is the second book, published ten years ago.) My interest in fictional names had been stirred a day or so earlier when (in a week of much cultural variety) I had seen Tracy Beaker Gets Real at the Oxford Playhouse. In the programme notes, author Jacqueline Wilson explained the source of her heroine's unusual monicker: "I was thinking about Tracy in my bath one morning, trying to invent a distinctive last name for her. Bathroom's aren't really inspirational rooms. I peered around me, muttering 'Tracy Soap? Tracy Flannel? Tracy Toothbrush? Tracy Tap? Tracy Toilet?' I gave up at this point. I washed my hair and then reached for the old Snoopy beaker I keep on the side of the bath so I could rinse off all the shampoo. I stared at the beaker - and smiled. I'd found my name."

No similar story attaches to the Bascombe name, which Richard told me - as he signed my copy of The Lay of the Land - was plucked out of the air as being suitably straightforward and with no obvious baggage attached. "As a matter of fact," he explained, "it was very much a last-minute choice. All through the writing of the book the character had been called Slocum, and it was only when I finished it that I remembered this was the name of the main character in Joseph Heller's Something Happened."

Heller's book was his long-awaited follow-up to Catch-22, which was begun (as not many people know) in Oxford in 1950 while its author was on a Fulbright scholarship. Refreshing my memory about the book, I found the following on the Internet: "Heller's long-awaited second novel records the many setbacks and disappointments of an ordinary businessman, Bob Slocum, described as one of the dreariest protagonists in American literature. The book is an unrelenting critique of American values, and Kurt Vonnegut would praise its author as "the first major American writer to deal with unrelieved misery at novel length".

This surprised me slightly, for Vonnegut must surely have been forgetting Richard Yates, of whose great and mega-depressing series of novels he has long been a leading champion. My copy of Yates's 1961 novel Revolutionary Road - perhaps the best of his books - carries his recommendation on the back cover: "The Great Gatsby of my time . . . One of the best books by a member of my generation" - Kurt Vonnegut. Any Gray Matter readers who have not read this astonishing portrait of a doomed marriage are assured they have a memorable literary experience in store. The book is published by Methuen which, to its eternal credit, is steadily bringing out the complete Yates oeuvre: the other so far available are Young Hearts Crying, The Easter Parade, Cold Spring Harbor, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates and - most recently - A Special Providence, which came out in July.

It might appear that I have wandered rather far from Richard Ford, but this is not the case. For Richard has been another big-name champion of Yates. My 2001 copy of Revolutionary Road carries a superbly written introduction by him. In it he states: "Among readers of American fiction since the beginning of the 1960s, Revolutionary Road . . . has become a kind of cultish standard. And especially this is true among writers, who have kept its reputation burnished by praising it, teaching it, sometimes unwittingly emulating its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings - about which it conjures shocking insights and appraisals. We marvel at its consummate writerliness, its almost simple durability as a purely made thing of words that defeats all attempts at classification."

I quote this at length in the hope that it might inspire some of you to read this or other of Yates's remarkable books. In my brief chat with Richard Ford last week, I was able to thank him for pointing so many of us in the direction of Yates's work. It hardly needs saying that I thanked him, too, for his own, and especially for The Lay of the Land, which I am reading with growing enjoyment, and at a leisurely pace, thereby delaying my arrival at The End.

Its long, sprawling sentences are a far cry from the terse pair that began this brief article, But as he told his rapt audience at the QI - citing another giant of American literature who happened to be his friend: "Raymond Carver's prose, rich in subordinate clauses and in different kinds of syntax, showed that we can all speak in more than one voice." In whichever he speaks, though, we surely wish to listen.