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ALSO IN SALON:
No more magic realism
A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies.
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women with men:
BY RICHARD FORD
BY DAVID ULIN Richard Ford is best known as a novelist, but for many years he has been an accomplished writer of short stories as well. In the past decade, Ford has stuck primarily to full-length projects, including the deft but underrated "Wildlife" and "Independence Day," the first novel to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Now he's returned to the shorter form in "Women with Men," a volume of three long stories -- they are virtually novellas -- that give us a sense of where he's going and where he's been. Unlike Ford's earlier efforts, "Women with Men" is a mixed bag, equal parts superficial and profound. Its best story, "Jealous," returns to the Montana of "Wildlife" and his 1987 story collection, "Rock Springs," using language that is laconic but precise to reflect the deep disquiet in its characters' hearts. Revolving around a 17-year-old boy named Larry, who, with his Aunt Doris, sets off to visit his mother in Seattle for Thanksgiving, the narrative explodes into serendipitous, nearly random violence that highlights the at-times-incomprehensible forces in Larry's world. Ford expertly delineates the interior life of adolescence, describing Larry's odd mix of reticence and engagement, his not-quite-passive sense of being on the verge of life. As the boy declares, "I wanted to get out of Montana, where we didn't have a TV and had to haul our own water and where the coyotes woke you up howling and my father and I had nobody to talk to but each other. I was missing something, I thought, an important opportunity ... And after that it would always be impossible to explain how things really were." "Women with Men" runs into trouble when Ford veers from the familiar to the foreign textures of expatriate life. Both "The Womanizer" and "Occidentals," the longer writings that bracket "Jealous," take place in Paris and involve men who, at least in part, desire refuge from marriages gone awry. Although these pieces have their moments, each suffers from a meandering structure, relying on aimless walks through the city to establish the ramifications of exile, the way "it didn't feel the least romantic. It felt purposeless, as if he himself had no purpose, and there was no sense of a future now."
Perhaps the key issue is that Ford is a quintessentially American author, whose work loses its authority when cast on foreign soil. Certainly his descriptions of Paris are flat, two-dimensional, as if written by Charley Matthews, the novelist/protagonist of "Occidentals," who had "never been to Paris, had simply chosen it on a whim." That's a difficult irony, for place (or its evocation) has long been Ford's most essential writerly attribute; one can't imagine "Rock Springs," or even "The Sportswriter," without recalling the delicate ways in which geography and action connect. Yet throughout much of "Women with Men," that interplay is missing, as if, in the words of Charley Matthews, "[H]e could never write about Paris -- the real Paris. He would never know enough."
David Ulin lives in Los Angeles. He is at work on a book about Jack Kerouac. |
