Sorry For Your Trouble by Richard Ford
Review by Gary Kaill
Such work that the Richard Ford blurb-ists must carry out—one could forgive them, almost, for lazily pilfering campaigns from the archive to save themselves a job. Here, in his first short story collection (bar 2014's Let Me Be Frank With You: four linked novellas that marked a return to the much-loved character of Frank Bascombe) since 2002’s A Multitude of Sins, Ford returns to the subject matter that has cemented his position as one of the world’s finest exponents of the form. Ahem: on St Patrick’s day, two ex-lovers unexpectedly cross paths two decades after they last met; a group of friends is forced to re-examine their shared history at dinner when one of them is unexpectedly widowed; a divorced lawyer finds himself confronting long-buried memories when approached by a group of women on a ferry crossing; in Paris, an ex-banker with a troubled past spends an unsettling evening with a young mother on US election night. The Ford milieu: you don’t so much get the picture, as take it home and frame it over the fireplace.
With Ford, certainly in the short form, familiarity is to be treasured, as he continues to hone and explore his mode: that fragmentary staging of lives at a distressed, pointed moment. Several of the stories here take place over the course of a matter of hours, sometimes days, but they stretch to contain and reveal the elastic vastness of lives. Ford is never less than a deeply efficient storyteller—while the prose remains an exuberant joy (the galloping reader will be forced to slow, if only to re-examine a particularly vivid passage), the narrative is taut and emphatically trim.
Readers familiar with the broader catalogue will recognise much of Ford’s pre-occupation with the transitory - often, explosively so - nature of relationships: their ability to change colour and shape in a quavering instant. Certainly, fans of A Multitude of Sins will find parallels with that collection’s most arresting story, ‘Abyss’, in the longest, and perhaps most satisfying, piece here: ‘Second Language’. Over the course of fifty or so pages, we track the relationship between widowed oil magnate Jonathan and divorced realtor Charlotte. They meet on an apartment viewing, and are married almost immediately afterwards. Two years of fulfilment and genuine happiness follow until, on a weekend away, the realisation dawns: ‘Divorce, Charlotte felt, would be a much better and easier state to maintain than marriage. If they stayed married (which she now understood they wouldn’t) she would end up saying words she did not want to say—harmful things she’d heard other people say.’ Ford knows better than most chroniclers of the heart that the matter-of-fact is all too often the best mirror to offer the doubting reader; on a knife edge the balance of constant love teeters.
’Second Language’ is up there with the finest of Ford, and the author is gracious enough to offer two of his most vividly appealing characters a second chance, once a deeper sadness eventually confronts one of them, to make amends. It closes the book in deeply moving fashion.
Elsewhere, ‘Leaving For Kenosha’ tracks, in unsparing detail, an afternoon in the lives of twelve year-old Louise and her father Walter. As they drive to the storm-flattened outskirts of New Orleans to say goodbye to Louise’s school-friend Ginny, who is soon to leave the city, Walter wrestles with his floundering relationship with his daughter and the manner of the divorce for which she still bitterly blames him, despite his wife Betsy’s adultery. ‘Betsy had found Mitch a suitable Greek revival on Palmer Street, then, in the come-back showing, fucked him in the client’s bed.’
’Nothing to Declare’ is the story of the ex-lovers: out drinking as the city celebrates St Patrick’s day, and all-at-once both cagey and playful as a stumbling night walk tracks their lives from then to now, tussles with the hazy what-ifs. Ford remains ably equipped to illuminate the cliff-edge moments that test the fortitude of his characters: ‘They were at the Monteleone, the shadowed old afternoon redoubt with the bar that was a carousel. It wasn’t crowded. Outside the tall windows on Royal a parade was shoving past. Boom-pa-pa, boom pa-pa. Then the trumpets not altogether on key. St Paddy’s was Tuesday. Now was only Friday.’ There are passages aplenty here that deploy similatry dazzling prose. There is still so much to learn, you realise as you encounter them, from this incomparable stylist.
A peerless stylist in many ways, still. At seventy-six, as he continues to work much of his career-long source material (as ever: white, middle-aged professionals managing the travails of marriage, education, work, property from a teetering position of economic and social privilege), his technical adroitness still has the capacity to astound. Not just the almost baffling misdirection with which he imperceptibly switches viewpoint (several passages here will cause the reader to pause, to confirm just who’s head they now find themselves in: a dizzying thrill) but that attentive care for the possibilities of language, the choice and placement of words.
In the ‘The Run of Yourself’, a lawyer returns to the coastal scene of his wife’s suicide, unsure how to best step into the rest of his life. ‘Grief, he realized, had evolved into jittery, inner, barely governable clamor…’ So much to leave behind, his slumping stasis seems to acknowledge. A friendship with a young animal shelter worker, Jenna, seems to hold the key to them both stepping away from the shadows of their current lives: ‘So, do you think we’ll get to know each other better and be friends?’ She seemed concerned. ‘Yes,’ he said. I don’t see why not. Do you?’ For a writer so often labelled as cold, or haughty, Ford affords many of his characters great loyalty, a notable goodwill.
If only, it must be said, he would steer his male narrators away from an at times exasperating misogyny. All too often, passages like this one encourage a heavy eye-roll: ‘The Irish look. Chin slightly incomplete. Two plump hands. The waist an equator, the legs large in a too-tight brown skirt that rode up revealingly. The tribal features.’ There are others, and too often the male equivalent in the scene is defined simply by his pose or the colour of his socks. A shame that, for a writer so fully engaged, and still finding new stories to tell, much of his material relies on the sly observations of characters for whom our sympathies become immediately diluted.
That matter aside, as with much of Ford, it remains the fact that it is not so much the newly experienced events of those forensically unpicked lives that unsettle: more the years of fracture that pre-date them. Here is the richness of the work. In part, this is the result of painstaking character creation, and the narrative ease with which (an inescapable Ford trademark by now) he can stuff a lifetime of prior events into a mere half dozen lines—between, say, a brief exchange of dialogue. In this role, he operates as the archaeologist of his own creations—brushing away the compacted dirt and debris to reveal the history in the substrate below.
Sorry For Your Trouble by Richard Ford is published 14/5/20