Richard Ford’s fifth collection of short stories (following Rock Springs, Women With Men, A Multitude of Sins and Let Me Be Frank With You, if you include Let Me Be Frank With You, which you may not, given that it’s four longish almost novellas about Frank Bascombe, the hero of Ford’s career defining trilogy The Sportswriter, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land) is just about as lovely as you’d expect it to be.
What we have here are nine stories, of roughly equal length (between 20-40 pages) concerning characters who are, to a greater or lesser extent, at turning points in their lives – quite possibly the last turning point. The collection has about it (perhaps unsurprisingly) an air of Southern courtly sophistication, of a writer who knows he can turn a phrase or two and has made a fine old career for himself out of that, relaxing somewhat to do that thing which he does ever so well. The narrators are mostly men, of a certain age (there is one story, ‘Displaced’, about a young boy, but you sense it is being told in retrospect, by a man of a certain age, and a story from the point of view of a woman, ‘A Free Day’), men who have been married at least once, men who are in the midst of divorces, or coming to the end of divorces, or dealing with starting again, afresh, at a certain age. There is, very occasionally, a slightly brittle, slightly bristly, John Irving-style prickliness about the modern world, snipes and asides about technology, that you sense will be shared by (yes I’m going to say it again) those men of a certain age (see Michael Frayn’s Magic Mobile for more on that). But for the most part Ford exists in the space similar to that occupied by the band The National at their most sanguine: life is hard but you can wrest moments (of beauty, of love, of laughter) from the pit, even as you know that’s just what they are – moments. Here is one such moment from the collection’s opener, ‘Nothing to Declare’:
“A rush of cold air escaped. Inside, the lobby was crowded still, and bright with people milling and loudly singing. All the things she’d taught him was a far too dense subject to commence now, though she had never made him happy or tried to. For him, the same. He had merely, briefly, almost loved her quite a long time ago.”
Here’s another such moment from ‘Leaving for Kenosha’:
“And for that instant Walter Hobbes experienced a sensation of something being about to happen. A feeling of impendment – not necessarily bad or good, just something in the offing. Though he knew that if he only paused in his thiking, as he’d recently learned to do, didn’t follow his thoughts all the way to where they led, or came from, then this sensation of impendment could subside or even develop into something he liked.”
It’s also worth saying that there is a strain of Irishness that binds these stories too (despite being raised in Mississippi, Ford’s father hails from County Cavan, and Ford and his wife holiday in Ireland, in Connemara, shooting woodcock, each year), and so, irrespective of whether the story is itself set in Ireland, there is more often than not, an Irish character to be found or a hint of the émigré shadow cast. In ‘The Run of Yourself’, a story in which a widower starts to come to terms with his widowhood, the narrator dwells upon his exuberant wife’s decline:
“Though the minute she was sick, to Peter Boyce’s surprise, she embraced it all again – the Irish. “You come back for it,” she said, whether you ever wanted it before, or it wanted you. It seemed to please her for a little while.”
The thing that sets Ford apart for this reviewer, the thing that keeps us coming back, is the hopefulness. We all need hope. It might be a match flame cupped in our hands in a force 10 gale, but Jesus how we need it. Here’s what we mean, a line or two from the close of ‘Jimmy Green – 1992’:
“In the garden, air was frigid. His clothes had warmed indoors, but now were awful again. He couldn’t stop shivering in his coat. The dog nosed the wet grass, unhurried. In a window opposite, a man stood in the dark beside a blue-lit aquarium, peering down as if Jimmy were an intruder. Rain demarked the season’s change. Now would be the famous Paris winter commencing. He would stay longer, he thought. Perhaps he would see this woman again. All didn’t have to be ruined. Better was possible.”
It may be that there is a lack of urgency here (we read Callan Wink’s exemplary collection, Dog Moon Run, side by side with Sorry for Your Trouble, and you can tell that one book is written by a younger man and one book written by an older man), but a lack or urgency is fine. These are comfort stories, even at their most affecting. Ford is, for this reviewer, quality, like an aged malt. Which is a comparison Ford himself might disapprove of but it feels right to us.
Any Cop?: Sorry For Your Trouble has about it the warmth and wisdom of late period William Trevor and is all the better for it. If you’re a fan of Ford, you won’t be disappointed.
Bookmunch 