A multitude of sins : stories /

Ford's novel Independence Day (1995) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Here, in 10 short stories, he meticulously explores love and intimacy, particularly the way people often fail to meet the challenges of truly connecting with their partners; 7 out of the 10 stories deal with infidelity. Yet even in the passionate liaisons forged outside of marriage, regret is a common theme. In the powerful "Abyss," Residential Agent of the Year Frances Bilandic, married to a man suffering from a terminal degenerative disease, enters a tumultuous affair with fellow realtor Howard Cameron. Her impulsive decision to ditch a seminar and take a side trip to see the Grand Canyon has unforeseen consequences: "What had been wrong with her? He wasn't interesting or witty or nice or deep or pretty. And up here, where everything was natural and clean and pristine, you saw it." Even in the beautifully written "Dominion," what passes for optimism in a Ford short story is the realization by a woman on the brink of divorce that "life shouldn't be always trying, trying, trying. You should live most of it without trying so hard." This is grim, unsettling fiction that radiates emotional pain from every precisely written line. --Joanne Wilkinson

Tracing the blueprint of human interaction in this latest collection of nine short stories and a novella, Ford signals the master text of lust standing behind the multitude of small sins he so tersely and poignantly chronicles. To err is human, and, in Ford's worldview, little is so human as the act of cheating on a wife or husband. In "Charity," a married ex-cop turned successful toy-maker, Tom Marshall, is caught by his wife, Nancy, a lawyer, having an affair. Johnny, the narrator of "Reunion," reflecting on his affair with Beth Bolger, sums it up like this: "At any distance but the close range I saw it from, it was an ordinary adultery spirited, thrilling, and then... it became disappointing and ignoble and finally almost disastrous to those same people." The novella, "Abyss," the collection's finest entry, tells the story of Frances Bilandic, a go-getting real estate agent with an older, invalid husband, and Howard Cameron, an ex-jock real estate agent with a more privileged background. They meet at an awards dinner in Mystic, Conn., and are soon screwing each other in hotel rooms in "little nowhere Connecticut towns." When both are sent to a convention in Phoenix, they look forward to time together, but Frances discovers Howard is a selfish putz, while Howard decides Frances is a little trashy and ditzy. Their extended outing ends in real disaster when Frances decides she wants to see the Grand Canyon. Ford's execution is flawless; this story has a canonical heft to it, bearing comparison to the best of Flannery O'Connor. Its presence alone makes this collection an essential volume, and the rest of the stories hold their own alongside it. (Feb. 19) Forecast: It's been four years since Ford's last book, the story collection Women with Men, was published to mixed reviews, and Ford's fans will turn eagerly to this new, more consistently satisfying collection. Released in a first printing of 75,000, it promises to do well sales-wise as well as critically. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Ford returns with this collection of ten stories on the topic of adultery and its attendant sins of deception and revenge. Like John Updike, our professor emeritus of infidelity, Ford focuses exclusively on Middle America. His people are white-collar suburbanites, just a step up the economic ladder from Rabbit Angstrom. Unlike Updike, however, Ford views extramarital sex as pitiless and bleak. We never see the intoxicating early stages of an affair, only the messy waning moments. The guilty couples wonder what prompted them to stray, while the victims feel like idiots for behaving properly. In "Dominion," an American lawyer is confronted by the irate husband of his Canadian mistress. Later, he guesses that the man was an actor hired by the woman as a means of extricating herself and moving on. In "Under the Radar," a young wife confesses to her husband that she has just broken off an affair with the host of the dinner party that they are about to attend. Fans of Independence Day should be warned that this new book, while just as well written, is much darker. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/01.] Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Actually, it's a single sin: adultery and its "multitude" of consequences, explored with varying success in this dour collection of nine stories and a novella, Ford's third such, following Rock Springs (1997) and Women Without Men (1987). The weakness of these stories (and Ford's signal failing as a writer) is monotony. His characters almost all act and sound essentially alike. They're guilty, evasive, self-justifying misbehavers. Yet this volume does attempt to work fresh variations on its potentially limiting theme: in an atypically tightly plotted vignette, for example, about an unfaithful wife's confession, her stricken husband's angry response, and the way she deals with him ("Under the Radar"); and in the novella "Abyss," where an adulterous pair of realtors' "business trip" to the Grand Canyon leads to a (totally unconvincing) melodramatic end. Elsewhere, Ford observes the breakup of a morose journalist's affair with a married woman painter ("Quality Time"); a middle-aged man's reminiscence of a duck-hunting expedition with his vagrant, cowardly father, who had abandoned the narrator and his mother for another man ("Calling"); and a Canadian woman who hires an actor to impersonate her husband, as a way of controlling her American lover (in the exquisitely titled "Dominion," which is nevertheless flawed by coy indirect references to the "game" thus being played). Two stories rise above the general level of uninspired competence: a knowing revelation of the calculated innocence with which an adulterous ex-cop slowly destroys his wife's impulse to forgive him ("Tom championed some preposterous idea for the sole purpose of having her reject it so that he could then do what he wanted to anyway"); and the superb "Puppy," in which the unwelcome presence of a stray mutt exacerbates a complacent professional couple's buried fears-until the unoffending creature becomes "a casualty of the limits we all place on our sympathy and our capacity for the ambiguous in life." Typical Ford: earnest, labored, only intermittently illuminated by vivid characters and convincing impressions of the variety of their lives. First printing of 75,000