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Title: A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford ISBN: 0-375-72656-X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.53 (17 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: An unflinching yet compassionate study of infidelity
Comment: 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.
Rating: 3
Summary: Strong serious, aimed at their subject
Comment: 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: 1
Summary: Astoundingly Poor
Comment: 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.
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Title: Women with Men : Three Stories by Richard Ford ISBN: 0679776680 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Independence Day by RICHARD FORD ISBN: 0679735186 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 07 May, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford ISBN: 0394729145 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 May, 1985 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Rock Springs by Richard Ford ISBN: 0394757009 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 August, 1988 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Whore's Child : Stories by Richard Russo ISBN: 0375726012 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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