I'm rereading my mentor Richard Ford's A Multitude of Sins. I sometimes forget what an able writer of short stories he is. Raymond Carver said Richard was the best American writer of sentences years ago. Only now am I beginning to appreciate what he meant. One could extend that comment to paragraphs, which Richard manages to use more meaningfully than most writers do pages.
You may have read Richard's Pen-Faulkner Award winning novel, The Sportswriter and his Pulitzer Prize winning sequel, Independence Day. Don't stop there. His other novels and short fiction are also worthy of your attention. The story that has struck me most a third of the way through rereading Multitude is "Calling." It takes what could be melodramatic material, the tale of a teenaged boy whose father has left his mother for another man in 1961, and mines it not for emotion, but for clarity. One of the most revealing insights is that the ill-starred hunting trip in the story is not the moment of truth. If there was a single deciding moment, it has already already happened. More likely, there were several, and they may have been so inexorable as to be fait accomplis before the parties knew what was going on. This is the kind of brilliant revelation I'm always surprised to see Richard produce seemingly effortlessly. If you haven't been reading Richard Ford, do. If you have, do it some more.
Books I've recently ordered include Booker Prize Nominee Monica Ali's Brick Lane, former Portland Police Chief Charles Moose's Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper and Stolen, a light sci-fi work by Kelly Armstrong, a new writer who wrote an enjoyable first novel, Bitten.
Note: A version of this entry appeared on Silver Rights.
Article comments
1 - Rodney Welch
I hated "Calling" -- in fact I thought the first five stories in that book were all terribly weak, the worst being "Puppy." Luckily, the next four are superb, and the last one, a novella of sorts called "Abyss," is a stunning masterpiece.
2 - Mac Diva
Let me try to guess why you hated "Calling." I suspect it is because the main character doesn't 'grow.' If anything, he shrinks. After the three years in his young life during which his father causes a scandal and leaves his mother for another man and his mother subsequently dies of a drug overdose, apparently, the protagonist's parameters are set. He keeps expansive sorts like his father out of his life and leads his life conservatively. He believes the best one can do in regard to the damage people cause each other is mitigate it to the extent possible. That is NOT an optimistic outlook. In my youth, I would not have liked the resolution of the story, saying it is kind of defeatist. But, well into my 30s, I have arrived at the same conclusion about mitigation.
Is this close? Let me know. And, stay in touch. I like having people I can discuss literature with.