[In the following review of Rock Springs, Klinghoffer comments that Ford's short stories provide a fresh and powerful treatment of the theme of the basic instability of modern life.]

The characters in Richard Ford's new collection of short stories [Rock Springs] do a lot of hunting, a lot of fishing. In “Children,” three teenagers stand on a river bank in Montana; Claude has just caught a whitefish, and Lucy and George stand by watching him struggle with the dying fish as he tries to pry the hook from its mouth. “What a surprise that must be,” Lucy says. “For the fish. Everything just goes crazy at once. I wonder what it thinks.” Coming halfway through the book, the scene resonates—its image, really, is at the heart of Rock Springs. What one character or another experiences in each of the book's ten stories is just that sudden, wild sensation of being caught, pulled completely without warning out of his accustomed life—and plunged suddenly into catastrophe. By the end of each story, something has “just gone crazy” for someone: he has been hooked and reeled in, struggling and gasping. Claude answers Lucy's question: “They don't. Fish don't think.” But of course people do. And what they think in that moment of crazy helplessness, and the moments, days, and years that follow, is what Rock Springs is about.

Ford's characters catch trout and whitefish, shoot deer and geese, but in each story it is the men who are the real prey. Not of other men, though; not of the gods or of history either, but of chance, sheer arbitrariness. The idea is not an especially provocative or colorful one (neither, really, is Rock Springs, the dominant tone of which is a little too grey), but in Ford's hands the metaphor nevertheless seems fresh and feels powerful. What makes people so vulnerable to getting jerked out of the stream is the basic instability of modern life. None of Ford's characters has a permanent home, a stable family. Some of them are running from failed marriages, or from the law; others are biding their time between jobs, in the no-man's-land of the temporarily unemployed, getting ready to make a dash for it before the landlord asks for the rent and the gas bill arrives. No one in Ford's world lives a “normal” life. In “Empire,” Marge wonders if such a thing even exists: “Nothing's normal, right?” she says. “That's just a concept.”

Ford agrees with her. In the same story, he encapsulates this sense of instability in his notion of the frontier. “We're out on a frontier here, aren't we, sweetheart?” Marge asks her husband as they lie, watching a great prairie fire from the safety of their railroad-car sleeping compartment. Ford's stories take place in Montana and Wyoming, on the frontier between America and Canada, between the Eastern and Western United States, a land “half wild,” not quite civilized yet. His narrators are all between the ages either of thirty and forty, or ten and twenty—that is, on the border between youth and maturity, or between childhood and manhood. (They're also mostly Sam Shepard clones—white men, more or less working-class, with mild personalities and good hearts. None are memorable as characters.) As a whole, they live on the frontier between jobs, between women, between lives.

Helpless and unstable as they are, living perpetually “in between,” they are easy prey for chance. In “Optimists,” Roy Brinson punches a man in the chest, inadvertently knocking the life out of him. He doesn't mean to kill him—he just does it, and in doing so he destroys his own life and tears his own family apart. Nothing he had done or experienced could have predicted such a thing. The narrator in “Rock Springs,” the title story, “start[ing] down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete,” with his daughter and his girlfriend Edna, finds himself womanless, suddenly and inexplicably, when Edna decides she's just had enough of him. Without reason or warning, in a moment the ground drops out from under his life.

In the face of all this, what Ford's characters feel is a powerful sense of isolation: from each other, from the stable, “normal” world, and—most importantly—from control over their own lives. They remind you of Joe Christmas in Light in August—thinking, “Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something.” It's as if they're cut off from their own words and actions, watching them come into being but unable to exercise any control over them. The difference is that Faulkner's world is a product of history, his characters trapped by their pasts. Ford's people face the future with all of Joe Christmas's passive dread, but their fates have been assigned to them as if at random. History plays little if any part in the direction of any individual's life. Quentin Compson would be incomprehensible in a Richard Ford story.

Sensibly, Ford's characters adopt an attitude not so much of despair—because things could very well turn out all right in the end—but of passive acceptance. Starling and Lois in “Fireworks” toast “better cards on the next deal.” It's as if the future already exists, just waiting for a fellow to come along and make the best of it: make the best of it and hope no one gets hurt.

Actually, though, for Ford it doesn't all just end there. This random absurdity has the grievous effect of turning people away from each other and into themselves. One of the most moving scenes in the book comes at the end of “Optimists,” when Roy and his mother meet again, in a supermarket, after years of separation following the departure of his father and her husband. As they part, this time probably forever, she leans through an open window to kiss his cheek and hold his face in her hands. People can touch each other; there are moments when the isolation caused by the randomness of life can be breached; but they are few and far between. Critics have compared Ford to Walker Percy, but an essential difference between the two (aside from the fact that Percy is twice as witty as Ford) is in their attitude toward the transformative power of human contact. In The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett is rescued from his despair through his loving relationships with Jamie, Sutter, and Kitty. In Richard Ford's world, though, all we can hope for from love is that it will keep us warm for a while, safe for the moment from the chilling effects of chance.