Traveling Men
The author’s father was a traveling salesman, and it seems that this had a lasting impact upon his writing. The short fiction of Richard Ford is dominated by movement. Men are in constantly motion, traveling from one place to the next, often aimlessly drifting. It is not mere accident that Ford is not a writer who can be depended upon to set his stories in a single town or region. The setting of the stories span the country geographically, topographically and socially, extending from New Jersey to Arkansas to Montana as well as the occasionally foray across borders. One of the author’s most famous stories concludes with imagery that is almost too perfect a statement on the relevance of this theme to exist: the protagonist of “Rock Springs” peeking into the windows of cars parked at a motel in the Wyoming city which gives the story its title, asking the reader directly what they would think of such a scene if they happened across it.
All Marriages are Unhappy
Tolstoy begins a novel with the famous observation that while all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique way. As far as one anyone can tell, Ford has enjoyed a long and happy marriage himself which seems (though these things can never be known for sure by outsiders) completely at odds with his portrayal of marriage in his stories. Perhaps the omnipresence of broken marriages in the short stories is Ford’s tacit agreement with Tolstoy on the subject of marriage: all happy ones alike and that doesn’t make for the conflict necessary for good storytelling. One thing is for sure, however, and it is that though there are a number of portraits of the union of man and woman into husband and wife which indicates marriage is not typically a happy union, the unhappy marriages are not necessarily unalike. For the most part, these marriages seem to begin crumbling as the result of infidelity, adultery or the suspicion therein by one partner of the other. A Multitude of Sins is a short story collection featuring a multitude of marriages ripped apart by third parties.
Boys to Men
Several of Ford’s most critically acclaimed stories reveal the protagonist through the duality of being a young boy recalled by the man they became. “Communist” is a story by a forty-something man reflecting back to an incident that occurred when he was sixteen. The central event in “Optimists” in the life of the adult narrator happened when he was fifteen: his father’s accidentally killing a man. In both those stories, one gets a glimpse of the man as well as the boy with endings offering a sort of philosophical punctuation at the end. “Jealous” is another story about a teenage boy involved in the killing of a man, but concludes with the boy still trapped there in childhood, forcing the reader to draw a conclusion about how it will impact him later on. Most the men in the fiction of Ford leads lives which can easily lead readers to imagine similar traumatic memories that remain unspoken in their narratives.
