SOURCE: Henry, Brian. “Richard Ford.” In American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, edited by Jay Parini, pp. 57-75. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Henry provides an overview of Ford's short fiction.]

FORD'S MONTANA: ROCK SPRINGS AND WILDLIFE

Ford's short stories differ from his novels primarily in length. The protagonists and narrators in his stories, as in his novels, are male. They have problems with women and infidelity, with work and money, with alcohol and responsibility and violence. They tend to brood on their pasts, they have bad luck, and they lack a sense of purpose. They have seen opportunity diminish to the point of vanishment.

Yet they survive. The most striking aspect of Ford's short stories is how they illuminate the human capacity for survival. Despite the threads of desperation and alienation that run throughout Rock Springs, Ford's primary achievement in these stories is allowing his characters a small measure of hope in the face of hardship and ruin.

Given its brevity, the short story provides a formal challenge that novels, with their sprawl and depth, cannot offer. Ford, though, views the short story less as a formal alternative than as an economical complement to the novel. He claims not to assign much weight to the short story form; for him, writing short stories is “a minor contribution to the saga of mankind,” and he admits to writing approximately one short story per year, primarily to have new work available at public readings. However, Ford's own achievements with his short stories in Rock Springs demonstrate a studied proficiency despite his apparent casualness.

Most of the stories in Rock Springs occur in Montana, in or near Great Falls. Ford's Montana is a state where people go to jail for writing bad checks, where catastrophe is as common as boredom, and where the vastness of the landscape reinforces the individual's feeling of insignificance. Also known as Big Sky Country, with its wide expanses and interminable horizon, Montana serves well as a locus of isolation: the large physical distances are mirrored by an equally large emotional distance between the characters.

Although Raymond Carver is frequently mentioned in relation to Ford because of the bleakness of the stories in Rock Springs, some critics have recognized the crucial differences between Carver and Ford: Ford “doesn't seem to need the ‘existential’ alienation and tight-jawed bitterness that preside over the knowing silences in so much ‘minimalist’ fiction”; “Ford is not the minimalist writer some critics have taken him to be. … He resists the tempting rhetoric of abrupt ends, and lets his characters mull over their losses.” Indeed, Ford's style is more expansive and digressive than Carver's, his sentences longer and more sweeping. And where Carver has become associated with minimalism—with concision, compression, distillation, and understatement—Ford's stories are concerned with exploring his characters' motivations, thereby producing voices more ruminative than in Carver's work. While most of Ford's characters in Rock Springs, like those in much minimalist fiction, are marginals on the wrong side of luck, they feel a persistent need to understand their situations and to unravel their responses to those situations.

Eight of the ten stories in Rock Springs are narrated in the first-person voice, the other two (“Fireworks” and “Empire”) in the third person. Every narrator is a white male, near Ford's age or younger. Characters like Eddie Starling (“Fireworks”), who has been unemployed for half a year, and Earl Middleton (“Rock Springs”), who steals a Mercedes for a Montana-Florida excursion with his lover and daughter and breaks down near Rock Springs, are typical. Many of Ford's male characters seem interchangeable, like parts in a machine. Yet these characters never become predictable, fulfilling Ford's wish “to write only characters which have the incalculability of life.”

In these stories, Ford strives for intimacy between his characters as well as tension—narrative and psychological. The stories are consistently sad, because their characters, even if they begin as a member of a family or in a relationship, or if they meet someone significant during the story, usually end up alone—abandoned, divorced, transient. But a surprising amount of empathy appears in the stories, such that the narrator of “Sweethearts,” after helping his lover escort her ex-husband to jail, remarks: “I knew, then, how you became a criminal in the world and lost it all. Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in.” Ford deftly navigates these situations, garnering substantial praise in the process.

Ford's fourth novel, Wildlife, shares its unforgiving Montana setting and its mood with most of the stories from Rock Springs. Set in 1960, the year Ford was sixteen years old, the novel portrays a family's collapse and a teenager's attempt to understand what makes a life. The novel's narrator, Joe Brinson, is a sixteen-year-old boy who, along with his parents, is a recent transplant from Lewiston, Idaho. The end of Joe's childhood begins when his father, Jerry, a golf pro teaching at a local country club, loses his job. Jerry sulks for a while, grows distant from his wife, Jean, then suddenly and against Jean's wishes decides to leave to help fight the forest fire that has been raging for months north of Great Falls. Immediately after Jerry's departure, Jean starts sleeping with Warren Miller, a wealthy, older, and slightly crippled but threatening man.

The fire, caused by arson, becomes a heavy symbol of the lack of control humans have over the natural world and over their own lives. Jerry's rash decision stems from his desire to take control of something for once; but after three days he realizes the fire will not be subdued: “We just watch everything burn.” This lack of control deepens when he returns home and learns about Jean and Miller.

Although Ford's work has explored varieties of love triangles, this one becomes complicated by Joe's mother flaunting her infidelity in front of her son; she brings Joe to dinner at Miller's and allows Miller to come to their house later that night. By involving Joe in her affair with Miller, she transforms him into both witness and accomplice. The least judgmental of narrators, Joe remains stoic in the face of both his mother's infidelity and his father's temporary inability to cope with circumstances. Joe is chronically agreeable, and he habitually answers “I know it,” “All right,” “I understand,” and “Okay” when he really does not understand, when things are not “okay” or “all right.” In a way, Joe is civilized to a fault, seeking the path of least resistance whether he believes, understands, or agrees with what he hears. This trait becomes significant when Joe sees Miller, naked, in the bathroom of his own house, and feels guilty and helpless, like “a spy—hollow and not forceful, not able to cause anything.” His mother later catches him in the hallway watching her and says “Oh God damn it,” slaps him twice, and then says “I'm mad at you.” Instead of becoming angry or upset, Joe meekly responds, “I didn't mean it … I'm sorry.”

Joe emerges as a lonely, emotionally detached teenager whose entire social life revolves around his parents. He respects and loves his father, and steadfastly wishes for his return, especially after his mother's infidelity threatens to destroy the family and, therefore, his social network. But Joe also loves his mother and withstands her misplaced rage and frustration, even as she becomes increasingly cynical and bitter toward him. Jean knows her actions with Miller are immoral, especially since her son has seen them together, and fears her son's judgment; but she becomes angry when he seems not to judge her. In fact, Joe's primary reaction to his mother's behavior is forbearance.

Because of the violence of so much of Ford's work, the gradually increasing tension in Wildlife seems destined to culminate in a final act of violence. But when Joe's father, confused and anguished, tries to set fire to Miller's house, he fails to ignite anything but the front porch, briefly, and is humiliated and almost arrested. Though formally taut, Wildlife sags with resignation, and its close is anticlimactic, with Jean's and Miller's affair ending, Miller eventually dying of an extended illness, and Jean drifting and finally returning to Jerry. The novel stops rather than ends, with none of Joe's emotional dilemmas resolved.

According to Ford, “Wildlife got the most effusive praise of any book I'd written before Independence Day, but it also got the widest variety of responses—some very negative, which I found perplexing.” Ford attributes this critical divergence to the novel's “sensitive subject,” which “some readers simply couldn't deal with.” Yet some critics, like Sheila Ballantyne, who considers Wildlife “a thin book rather than a rich one,” have found fault in the book's structure and the choice of Joe as its narrator. The novel's eye as well as its “I,” Joe witnesses all of its pivotal events, a strategy that transforms him into a fictional construct and requires his presence at the novel's important moments. According to Mark Spilka, Joe's “narrative sensibility,” which is “plainly earnest and only moderately intelligent,” weakens the novel because it cannot present “richly and deeply drawn characters in a felt complex world”; Joe's shortcomings as a narrator, then, produce characters who “come through like thinned-out versions of their short story origins, attenuated rather than enriched.”

THE LONG STORIES: WOMEN WITH MEN

In the three long stories in Women with Men, Ford keeps one foot in Montana (with “Jealous”) while extending his vision to Paris in the book's two longer pieces, “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals,” his first pieces set in Europe. Perhaps because Ford ventures into new territory here, the critical response to Women with Men has been mixed, with some critics hailing Ford's continual honing of his skills and others complaining about redundancy or “diminution of ambition.” The book's title, which reverses that of Hemingway's Men without Women, has engendered substantial discussion about the roles of women in Ford's fiction, with Michael Gorra claiming “Ford has throughout his work acknowledged the central importance that women and marriage have in the lives of men” and Paul Quinn asserting “strong women characters in the stories ultimately exist only to mark the shifts in sensibility of one or other troubled male. Despite the promise of the volume's title, then, we do not get women with men, no communion of spirits, but a sense of self-absorbed men moving around, against or through women.”

According to Quinn, “Jealous,” the shortest of the stories, “could almost be read as a parody of the hegemonic, all-American short story: a first-person narration by a confused adolescent … in transition and in transit.” In “Jealous,” seventeen-year-old Lawrence and his aunt Doris are planning to take the train to visit Lawrence's mother, who has separated from Lawrence's father and moved to Seattle. While waiting for the train, Lawrence and Doris see police officers shoot a man to death in a bar and Lawrence experiences Doris' incestuous passion for him, an attraction that acquires additional complexity because Doris has slept with Lawrence's father several times. Despite the story's potential for disaster, it ends with Lawrence and Doris on the train, her passion for her nephew unfulfilled. Doris falls asleep as Lawrence watches her and then nearly succumbs to “the scary feeling … that you're suffocating and your life is running out,” a feeling he overcomes such that, “for the first time in my life, I felt calm.”

Although older than Lawrence, the men in “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals” seem especially inept and callous. Where Ford's stories and novels set in Montana, New Jersey, and Mexico convincingly evoke those places, “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals” purposely fail to recreate Paris because their protagonists, Martin Austin (“The Womanizer”) and Charley Matthews (“Occidentals”), cannot progress beyond their expectations and tourist guides. In effect, the stories' shortcomings are the protagonists' shortcomings, since their inability to speak French, or any language other than English, illuminates their inability to communicate effectively with anyone.

In “Occidentals” Charley Matthews, author of one unsuccessful novel and a former professor of African-American literature (he is neither African American nor especially interested in African-American literature), has come to Paris with his lover, Helen Carmichael. Intending to visit the office of his French publisher, Matthews learns his editor has suddenly decided to leave the country, stranding him in Paris with no plans but a possible lunch with his translator. Disappointed, he and Helen wander the city dazed by fatigue.

Although Helen has accompanied him to Paris, Matthews does not have strong feelings for her: “He hadn't really fallen for [her]; he simply liked her.” When Helen, whose cancer has been in remission for a year, begins to feel sick in Paris, Matthews tries not to think of her illness; but the cemetery outside their hotel window serves as a morbid reminder of the inevitability of death. He begins to pity her, which makes him “feel fond toward her, fonder than he'd felt in the entire year he'd known her,” and he tells her he loves her, a pronouncement she resists because she knows it is false. When Helen sleeps in very late the next day, Matthews leaves her in the hotel room. Her cancer has returned with such force that she decides to commit suicide by overdosing on her medicine. Her decision and her suicide occur while Matthews is wandering around Paris, considering arranging a tryst with a former lover and shopping for a Christmas gift for his daughter. When he returns to the hotel, he finds her corpse and a letter (“We were never in love. Don't misunderstand that”), realizing too late “what marriage meant.”

In “The Womanizer,” Martin Austin, a married American in Paris on business, tries to seduce Joséphine Belliard, an assistant editor for a French publisher. Joséphine is in the process of a divorce because her husband has published a “scandalous” novel “in which Joséphine figured prominently: her name used, her parts indelicately described, her infidelity put on display in salacious detail.” Austin pursues Joséphine not out of passion but out of a compulsion arising from ennui. This halfhearted attempt at seduction, though unsuccessful, is sufficient to raise his wife's suspicions; she tells him he has become “unreachable” after he returns home. When Austin responds, “I'm sorry to hear that. … But I don't think there's anything I can do about it,” her reaction is both decisive and unexpected: “Then you're just an asshole. … And you're also a womanizer and you're a creep. And I don't want to be married to any of those things anymore.” She leaves and stays away from the house, unwittingly giving him the opportunity to take advantage of the situation: “free to do anything he wanted, no questions asked or answered,” he packs his bags and flies back to Paris, hoping to initiate a relationship with Joséphine.

While in Paris, Austin desires Joséphine but thinks “normally, habitually, involuntarily” of his wife, who “occupied … the place of final consequence—the destination to practically everything he cared about or noticed or imagined.” He still thinks “he could never really love Joséphine,” who has become too preoccupied with her divorce to register any passion for Austin. When she leaves her four-year-old son with Austin to visit her lawyer, Austin's distractedness has nearly tragic consequences when he forgets about the boy, whom he has taken to a park, and the boy is almost molested. Joséphine's reaction is one of total rage and disgust: “You are a fool … You don't know anything. You don't know who you are. … Who do you think you are? You're nothing.”

“The Womanizer” ends with Austin in Paris, alone, thinking of his life “almost entirely in terms of what was wrong with him, of his problem, his failure—in particular his failure as a husband, but also in terms of his unhappiness, his predicament, his ruin, which he wanted to repair.” In this regard, Austin's situation recalls the human dilemmas faced by many of Ford's characters, thus illuminating the common elements of life that abound in and bind his works of fiction.