A Multitude of Sins

Rating:
Summary: Depressing and thought-provoking, but a good read
Review: A Multitude of Sins is a very interesting, somewhat depressing set of stories. Every one of them deals with adultery in one form or another. Sometimes a past adultery informs the plot of the story, sometimes the ending of it is the driving force. ... though, none of the stories actually deals with the beginning of it, except in flashback. Many times, the parties involved think back to the beginning and try to figure out what has gone wrong, and why a thrilling, secretive experience has become dull and boring.

The highlight of the novel has to be Abyss, the last story in the book. It's the longest story, and allows Ford to really get into the character of the two protagonists. Again, you see the beginning of their affair in flashback, the sudden spark when they first touch, and the red hot desire when they first truly look into each other's eyes. When the characters are sent to Phoenix for a convention, you see how their feelings have changed as the height of their passion comes crashing down into the dullness of reality and they each see what the other person is really like. Watching this relationship crumble, and then seeing the unexpected (at least to me) resolution to the story, was very intriguing, and made me want to finish the story as soon as possible.

The characters in each story are seekers, in a way. They are all searching for something to make their life complete. They are lost souls, searching for the fulfillment that life should bring, but doesn't always. Having an affair seems to them, at first, to fill that gap, but it never actually does. That's what makes the stories so depressing, in a way: seeing the fruitless search for life. Only one story has what's even close to a happy ending, and even that happiness is caused by the realization that their marriage is truly over. Most of the stories end with the characters having fallen, picking themselves up and resolving to move on through life's dense fog. A little wiser, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Some people never learn.

Still, depressing or not, I found all of the stories worthwhile to read. From the short vignettes to the longer pieces, each one contained interesting situations, or a nice twist, or even just making a point about life. I can't say I enjoyed the book, but I certainly did find it fascinating. I have never read any of Ford's stuff, but I may have to now that I've read some of his short fiction.


Rating:
Summary: Psychoanalysis of love failure
Review: Far is the bohemien world of Armistead Maupin's Barbary Lane. Far is the feminist naughtyness of Susan Isaacs' Compromising Positions. I would classify Richard Ford next to the Albee of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf " or Barthes' "Lover's discourse fragments". Ford analyzes human feelings, dissects them,and gives you disconsolate reports on the occasionality of good actions. I appreciate his denouncing of the shallowness of some people's (too many) feelings, and the unhappiness and frustration that superficiality, petty egoism and indifference are causing. I don't agree whit Ford's philosophy, that is mostly chance that make us opt for the good, but I must admit that his stotytelling is masterful.

Rating:
Summary: Weight without being dull.
Review: Ford's short stories are weighty, without being dull. This weightiness does not derive from any complexity in concept or even character, nor does it derive from prose which is complex. Rather, there is a wealth of detail in terms of what the characters are experiencing. The common subject in this collection is marital infidelity.

Rating:
Summary: Intimate but cold
Review: I am a great fan of the short-story and I very much enjoyed this book for its 360 degree examination of adultery. Adultery is just one form of infidelity, thus I prefer the former term to described this book. He explores adultery in its variety from its mildest form, complusively watching a naked women in another building while his wife sleeps, to the full blown long-term affair. While the writing is strong, I disagree with a previous reviewer about what he has to say about adultery, I don't think he says much actually.

I appreciated the fact that he doesn't place a specific judgement on it, but rather he shows the consequences of adultery and in these, the judgement is illustrated. But I kept waiting and waiting for the characters to divulge their true reasons for committing adultery. I just couldn't find it. The book is full of mid-life characters who seem to be committing adultery out of some "its what you do at this age" mentality, next in line on the college, marriage, house, kids pathway. I don't think Ford really gets to the bone. At times, it seems that just when a revealing insight is about to be addressed he pulls the bullfighter routine and just lets it brush by, merely teasing and toying with the reader. For all of the depth of conversation, I found the characters profoundly flat and cold. Having never read Ford before, I couldn't tell if this was intentional or not. Clearly the most satisfying story for me and not ironically why the book cover is of the train station is the story titled Reunion.

Rating:
Summary: a dud
Review: I usually jump at the opportunity to hear authors read their own works, due in part to curiosity as to what they sound like, but more for the nuances and inflections only they can give to their written words. With that said, I found Mr. Ford's reading of his own short story collections to be a pretty uninspired affair.

Mr. Ford, one of our most celebrated and meticulous authors, is not blessed with a terribly strong reading voice, and he uses an odd, choppy style with numerous inopportune pauses that would indicate (if we didn't know better) unfamiliarity with the stories. I liked Richard Poe's excellend reading of Ford's masterpiece Independence Day much better. Poe breathed a lot more life into the characters.

As for the stories themselves, they were all good, and some were excellent. I really enjoyed Reunion, about a man who stumbles across the husband of a woman he had an affair with, in Grand Central Station, and feels oddly compelled to confront. Our protagonist doens't have anything particular to say to the husband of his former lover, who has slugged him in a hotel in St. Louis, he simply wanted to create an experience where before there was none. Other stories explore similar topics of marital infidelity, and the bitter aftermath of doomed affairs.

I also really liked the story of the young married couple on the way to a dinner party in their Mercedes Benz station wagon, in which the husband is floored by an admission, by his young trophy wife, that she has slept with their dinner party host. His reactions, and the stony silence that develops between them, are indicative of the strained relations between almost every couple in the collection.

My only problem with the stories, after reading about 5-6 of them, is that they are too similar to one another. Ford keeps retreading the same ground, writing about lawyers, realtors, St. Louis and the Mayfair Hotel in a cool, detached third person narrative. After awhile you forget you are reading (or listening to) fictional stories, and almost get a sense you are peeking at notes of a marriage counselor with a clinical sense of detachment. Ford doesn't seem to experiment enough, and sometimes I would get in my car, pop in a tape about unfulfilled 40-ish adulterers, and wonder whether this is the story of the couple in a Canadian hotel, the Connecticut realtors on a business trip to Phoenix, or the Grand Central protagonist reminiscing about his affair at the Mayfair. Each of the stories works well on its own, but reading them back to back you see patterns develop that frankly grow a little tiresome. Read them one or two at a time to enjoy Ford's meticulous prose, and his sharp observations about middle class malaise.

Rating:
Summary: few can write this well
Review: If a short story sticks in your mind long after it has been read that says something about the writers craft. Fords short story called Under the Radar (which is in this book) is a good example of this.

Rating:
Summary: Astoundingly Poor
Review: If an author sets out to write a collection of short stories about adultery, you'd think they'd have a lo say about it, right? Well, Ford certainly expends plenty of words, but the net impact of them is next to nothing by the end of this incredibly feeble navel-gazing group of stories. Mind-numbingly similar in tone and temperament, the ten stories center of upper and upper-middle class white, middle-aged, married professionals who seem to have drifted into infidelity. Story after story plods cautiously along, poking at the consequences of adultery in a very mild way, with leaden dialogue and a lot of empty moodiness. Adultery is treated almost as a kind of bland rite-of-passage for a disconnected male. Marital infidelity can happen in so many ways for so many reasons, and yet Ford seems interested in only a very limited field of it. I have no idea what his personal background or situation is, but it's a collection you read and leave wishing the author had worked out their issues in therapy or something. If he wasn't such a literary bigshot, there's no way this would have been published-it strikes the same note over and over and over, and isn't provocative, insightful, or even interesting. PS. If you were planning on the audio version, don't. Ford is a terrible reader, sounding like someone reading the telephone book aloud as punishment.

Rating:
Summary: rather plain, grubby
Review: It's probably unfortunate that I took up this collection after just finishing a collection by the always superb TC Boyle. Ford knows how to write well, but the subject matter leaves him straining for effect. There may be one or two good compassionate stories to write about yuppies cheating on their spouses, but packing a whole book of what can only become redundant (and does by about the fourth story) is a serious drag on the reader. The best story is really the last, The Abyss.

I heard another reviewer here praise an earlier collection as superior. I shall head off to the library for that one....

Rating:
Summary: Strong serious, aimed at their subject
Review: Richard Ford is a serious writer. The times I have talked to him I have felt an almost priestly demeanor and a respectful attitude as he talks about his writing. He writes to find out about things, depict things, get things out of his system, to know what he knows, and share it with the world. It took him most of a good collection of short stories, a novella, and then another long story to get the whole coming of age thing in Montana amidst life crisis out of his system. Some would argue that Independence Day was just an attempt to rest those ghosts!

Here Ford deals with infidelities among the upper middle class. Much as I would prefer he return to what he saw when he was teach out in Montana, much as I feel the usual prejudice to dismiss these people, Ford gets close to the struggle inside all of us to feel we are here, we are touched or touching, and to have a little joy. Ford also gets at the relative emptiness of the whole landscape they people populate. Every approach makes the whole thing more precise.

Unfortunately, this isn't another Rock Springs, but it is good enough to read and reread and to know it helps us remember what life is like.

Rating:
Summary: An unflinching yet compassionate study of infidelity
Review: Richard Ford is undoubtedly one of America's finest authors. More than any other writer today, he has a special gift for creating characters with undeniable humanity. In this new collection of short stories, not his best work but excellent nonetheless, each character feels truly genuine, with human flaws and weaknesses that we all can relate to. Infidelity and its consequences is the main theme here, and Ford explores it with all the grace, subtlety, and compassion that readers have come to expect from him. The stories, for the most part, focus on everyday occurrences; Ford's work rarely relies on intriguing plot twists, but rather profound explorations of emotion and the human experience. In "Reunion," inspired by a John Cheever story, a man encounters the husband of a woman with whom he briefly had an affair, and stumbles through an awkward yet revealing conversation, set in the middle of Penn Station. In "Under the Radar," a woman admits to her husband that she had a brief affair with the host of a dinner party they are on their way to attend. In "Privacy," a man takes stock of his marriage after finding himself drawn to his neighbor, whose nude figure he views regularly from his apartment window. In each, Ford is deeply interested in the inner motivations of his characters. What makes them love? What makes them cheat? How do they justify their infidelities, both to themselves and their spouses? And how do they ultimately deal with their own guilt and the pain they have caused to those around them? Each of these questions is answered unflinchingly and unapologetically, but with the tenderness and charm for which Richard Ford's prose is well known.