Richard Ford: A multitude of sins

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

It's been a long time since a collection of short stories held me in the grip that Richard Ford manages with these searching, stark examinations of people just in or out of love, people with all the strange confusions and impulses of such conditions.

With most collections, the only thing the stories have in common is the author, and maybe a tone. But a unity of theme and attitude, and a consistently sharp characterisation, hold this book tightly together, so that at the end you carry people and their experiences in your head the way you do at the end of a good novel.

The sharp point of focus is where the lives of men and women sexually intersect, whether in marriage, in long-running illicit affairs or in briefer, more explosive casual relationships. Ford's great strength - the quality that raises his work from intelligent entertainment into an experience deeply felt by the reader - is that he surveys his characters with unblinking realism. He is never tempted by the sentimentality that would demean them and reduce their condition to melodrama.

All the stories begin calmly. The first few sentences pull you in quickly enough as good stories should, but they are statements of fact gradually embellished by layers of information and emotion that he slides into your mind, building up the tensions that compel your continuing attention.

The best stories are Quality Time, in which a man's casual lover suddenly makes an extraordinary request of him; Calling In, in which the desperate, gay father of a disintegrated family tries to reclaim some affection from his son; Under the Radar, the explosive end of a marriage; and Charity, the gradual unravelling of the marriage of two people who still love one another, after a fashion.

Only Puppy didn't hold me in its grip, mainly because Ford's ruminations seemed to walk down cul-de-sacs and I had to keep retracing his steps to little purpose. The other stories are so good, I read Puppy a third time to consider whether I had let him down as a reader, but still couldn't quite follow it.

I had never read Ford before A Multitude of Sins but I'll go back now and work through his novels.

Harvill Press

$34.95