In his new book of stories, Richard Ford’s use of metaphor is sometimes audacious enough to make you hoot with disbelief. Is the title, uh, " character " of the story " Puppy " — a stray, scrubby, disagreeable little mutt who barks for attention and then gets snappy when it’s given, and who tends to pee whenever he’s held — really meant to represent all that’s been repressed in the well-ordered lives of the childless couple who find the dog one day in their neat little French Quarter courtyard in New Orleans? Is Ford truly serious in titling a story " Abyss " about a rock-bottom adulterous couple’s visit to the Grand Canyon?
Well, he isn’t and he is. The puppy of " Puppy " is just one element in the lives of Bobby and Sallie, two fortysomething Yale-educated Southern lawyers. These days, as Bobby tells it, Sallie works mostly on fundraising (charity — get it?) and he argues, uh, " negligence " cases before the Federal Appeals Court. And, oh yes, Sallie’s had an affair, now ended, that Bobby doesn’t tell us about for several pages and that the couple don’t talk about at all. In " Abyss, " meanwhile, Howard Cameron and Frances Biladnic, whose adulterous affair seems completely sporting and arbitrary, and whose story Ford tells with a deft, comic touch, become meaner and meaner with each other as they head toward their fate, which is embodied by the world’s biggest hole.
Adultery figures to one extent or another in all 10 of these stories. (At 63 pages, " Abyss " qualifies as a novella.) And words like " choice " and " responsibility " get bandied about regularly. In his first collection of stories, 1987’s Rock Springs, Ford favored extreme settings and situations — barren Montana landscapes, weathered mining towns, characters down on their luck, broke, or on their way to jail — and violence was never far off. But Ford is also the creator of Frank Bascombe, the protagonist/narrator of The Sportswriter (1986) and the Pulitzer-winning Independence Day (1995), as loquacious and charming a middle-class divorced everyman as ever was. A Multitude of Sins splits the difference — a shotgun accident looms in one story, a minor off-stage character " has been made a guest of the State of Ohio " in another, and there is one on-stage death. But more dominant in the stories are the real-estate agents, lawyers, a journalist, all more or less economically secure, given to hyper-rationality even as they give in to the irrational urges of the flesh.
The language of rationalization pervades these stories, sometimes to comic effect, as characters modify and stretch their principles as a way to justify their behavior. " True, he was ready to cheat on his wife, " one adulterer says of her paramour, " but he also seemed like a decent family man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and no real wish to do anybody harm. " These rationalizations carry over into their own shocks of self-recognition. As one well-appointed adulterer thinks about himself while denying the accusations of an angry spouse: " It occurred to Henry that every single thing he was saying was a lie. That he had somehow brought into existence a situation in which there was not a shred of truth. How could that happen? "
No one in these stories really wants to do any harm, and when faced with the dire consequences of their own making, people are left wondering, " How could that happen? " Time after time, Ford’s characters are confronted with the responsibility for their actions and, as they say in the world of psychotherapy, are forced to " own " them. " None of this was any thing he’d caused, " thinks Howard as he and Frances race toward their rendezvous with the Grand Canyon. But before long he acknowledges, " You didn’t really get away with things. " In story after story, Ford’s characters try — and fail — to defer their own self-knowledge. " We are all . . . implicated in the lives of others, " says Bobby in " Puppy, " " whether we precisely know how or don’t. "
Ford works his variations on a theme over a grand palette of North American landscapes and particular settings, luxury hotels and cheap motels: Chicago, Flagstaff, Montreal, New Orleans, New York City, rural Michigan, suburban Connecticut, the rocky coast of Maine. The specifics are as varied as a suite in the Drake Hotel or a duck blind in a Louisiana bayou. Not every story comes across with equal force. " Charity " — about a married couple trying to reconcile during a vacation to the Maine coast — meanders in a desultory way to a realization that’s delivered with a dying fall. But " Puppy " builds in resonance, and " Abyss " sustains itself and delivers the kind of surprise that had me laughing out loud before it returned to an earned, perfectly measured gravitas. And " Calling " is the kind of coming-of-age story that was a touchstone in Rock Springs (a son goes duck-hunting with his estranged father) but is here delivered with richer nuance and its own surprising inversions (the macho, lesson-giving dad also happens to be gay, and he’s abandoned the protagonist’s mother for another man). Ford is working at a level of craftsmanship where a single word or phrase can echo and alter everything that came before it (as in the brief, prelude-like " Privacy, " where the story’s final word retroactively charges it with meaning).
Like that dirty little puppy, the truth keeps surfacing in Ford’s stories — sometimes as an image, sometimes as a blunt obscenity that punctures the civility of all that rationalization. No one commits any major crimes in these stories, but freedom of choice, Ford is saying, never comes without a price.
Richard Ford reads at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Tuesday, February 26, at 6 p.m. Call (617) 566-6660.
