This collection of ten short
stories by Richard Ford continues many of the themes familiar in his other
work.  His previous collection was Women
and Men and his best-known writing is his novel Independence
Day, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  Most of his main characters are married or
divorced, and much of their emotional energies are devoted to saving or
sabotaging their relationships.  Most of
the stories involve betrayal of one kind or another.  Some involve affairs, but often there are more subtle ways in
which characters lie to each other. 

For example, in "Quality Time,"
which originally appeared in The New Yorker, James Wales is staying in
Chicago to give a seminar at a college and he has met Jena, a married woman
with two children, after giving a public lecture.  He drives to a hotel to meet with her and on the way, he sees an
accident in which a street person is hit by a car and killed.  She makes a point to talk with him about her
parents and ask him about his life, and they make love passionately.   Afterwards, Jena talks about her family and
her views about the world, and then she asks him to tell her something that
happened to him.  He lies and says that
earlier that night he was robbed on his way to his car.  He is not sure why he didn’t tell her the
truth about the accident he saw, but presumably it was due to his reluctance to
be completely open with her.

These stories are not about the
impossibility of true communication — the characters do share love and are
mostly honest with each other.  Yet they
are full a sense of regret at the limitations of these relationships.  Most of these people seem world-weary,
feeling no guilt about their lies to their loved ones, gaining temporary
pleasure from these brief encounters. 
In one story, when a man’s lover suddenly dies in an accident when they
are taking an illicit holiday together, his head starts to pound and he hears a
roaring in his ears.  It’s not clear
what emotions these physical reactions represent, but after he has calmed down
a little, his first thoughts are about whether anyone else saw the accident and
whether he could walk away from the scene. 
At the end of the day, as he drives back home to whatever consequences
he will have to face, his overriding emotion is fear.

While these short stories are full
of wonderfully crystallized moments that reveal much about people’s lives, the
thematic scope is narrow.  At no point
does the writing match the astonishing tour de force of Independence Day,
in which Frank Bascombe, divorced New Jersey real estate agent, spends a July 4
weekend with his son.  In A Multitude
of Sins, one feels more removed from the characters, and less sympathetic
to and amused by their existential crises or upsets.  Ford is still am impressive writer, but his skills seem best
suited to the longer format of a novel in which he can build a far richer
narrative and more complex web of events that provide a stronger framework for
his wry commentary on the American way of life. 

© 2003 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is Chair of the
Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction