03/16/2020
Pulitzer-winner Ford’s middling collection (after Let Me Be Frank with You ) showcases men experiencing glimmers of epiphanies amid the process of mourning. In “The Run of Yourself,” a lawyer from New Orleans lives a quiet existence in Maine after his wife’s untimely death, and a chance meeting in a bar with a younger woman leads to a platonic sleepover and an eye-opening morning walk on the beach. In “Second Language,” Jonathan, a widower who made his millions in Texas oil, begins a new life in New York City with a shaky marriage. After his new wife’s mother dies, Jonathan comforts her while realizing they will never really understand each other. In the standout story, “Displaced,” 16-year-old Henry reels from his father’s death and lives in a rooming house with his mother in Jackson, Miss. Henry befriends Niall, an Irish-American teenager; after they get drunk, Henry lets Niall kiss him, and though he’s open to being comforted, he’s unwilling to explore a sexual relationship. Ford’s unrelenting exploration of life’s bleakness and sadness makes these stories enervating, particularly compared to his previous work, though his clear, nuanced prose continues to impress. Ford is a supremely gifted writer, but he’s not at his best here. (May)
"Once again, virtuoso Ford deftly sails the seas and storms of consciousness."
Booklist (starred review)
"Richard Ford remains an author hostage to the mysterious simplicities of emotional sentiment, commendably so."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence…One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald…Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it’s gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage…Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the “well-crafted, writing-class story,” that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings."
New York Times Book Review
"...both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class...This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision, what Emerson in his scholarly address failed to mention, the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life."
"Richard Ford remains an author hostage to the mysterious simplicities of emotional sentiment, commendably so."
%COMM_CONTRIB%Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2020-03-02
Though Ford remains most widely heralded for his novels, with Independence Day winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, his story collections have often been almost as cohesive and ambitious. The latest finds the author in his mid-70s writing about men who are also in life’s later stages and who are lost and bewildered by just about everything but the certainty and imminence of death. "Life—and it seemed very suddenly—was this now. And little more,” he writes in “Happy.” And “this” is where these white, privileged men of a certain age find themselves, in a time and place where the rules and truths by which they’d lived no longer seem to apply, where nothing seems to mean much or explain anything, where words themselves were incapable of conveying significance. One of them wonders whether “the entire passage of life, years and years, is only actually lived in the last seconds before death slams the door. All life’s experience just a faulty perception. A lie, if you like.” Many of them have roots in the South, residences in the Northeast, and some connection with Ireland, yet they don’t feel at home anywhere. Amid the darkness that permeates these stories, the longest two offer glimmers of something closer to hope, if not quite redemption. In “The Run of Yourself,” the collection’s 57-page centerpiece, a man who needs to “re-invent himself” following his wife’s suicide finds the possibility of some sort of direction through a chance connection with a directionless and much younger woman. And in the closing “Second Language,” two former spouses in what had been a brief second marriage for each sustain a relationship after their divorce. They know each other better, but how well can anyone really know anyone, or even themselves?
Powerfully unsettling stories in which men nearing the end of their lives wonder, befuddled, if that's all there is.
A collection of stories about lives shattered by divorce or death, with protagonists discovering that the pieces they are trying to put together no longer fit, and perhaps never did..... Powerfully unsettling stories in which men nearing the end of their lives wonder, befuddled, if that's all there is." — Kirkus Reviews
"Once again, virtuoso Ford deftly sails the seas and storms of consciousness." — Booklist (starred review)
"...both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class...This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision, what Emerson in his scholarly address failed to mention, the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life." — Wall Street Journal
"Richard Ford remains an author hostage to the mysterious simplicities of emotional sentiment, commendably so." — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence…One page later, a sparkling note of Fitzgerald…Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it’s gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage…Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the “well-crafted, writing-class story,” that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings." — New York Times Book Review
"...both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class...This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision, what Emerson in his scholarly address failed to mention, the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life."
