Breaking The Sixth. - 'A Multitude of Sins' - book review

A Multitude of Sins
Richard Ford
Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 286 pp.

Five years ago Richard Ford, fresh from the success of Independence Day, his second novel about Frank Bascombe (it was preceded by The Sportswriter), published a collection of three stories titled Women with Men. Two of the stories were long ones; their orbit was a Paris made gloomy and conflicted by the male protagonist wandering about it, and their tone differed markedly from the more open and extended first-person comedy of Independence Day. A Multitude of Sins continues and develops the note of uneasy ambiguity in ten stories where something bad invariably happens. Even when the story's outcome isn't disastrous--as in "Quality Time," in which an adulterous affair concludes itself--the man finds it impossible to conclude anything: "He knew he was not yet distinguishing things perfectly, wasn't confident which feelings were his real ones, or how he would think about events later." Such uncertainty is par for the course in Ford's fictional world.

The title, A Multitude of Sins, defuses the word sin into "sin," and since adultery is the condition of or fact behind most of these stories, its sinful nature--or lack of such--is explored rather than assumed. "There was a time when my marriage was still happy," is the portentous one-sentence paragraph that opens "Privacy," the first and shortest story in the book. In it the man, while his wife sleeps, watches out of the back window of their apartment an unidentified woman undressing and feels that the secrecy, the "very illicitness" of such watching, had to do with his "impending failures." Such failure is the animating principle of these fictions in which men and women, unable to live in clear convictions, marital or otherwise, are condemned to make mistakes. The man in "Reunion" who runs into the former spouse of his former lover in Grand Central Station decides that it is this "later time"--the encountering of the spouse rather than the adultery itself--that really matters. But the story's final paragraph finds him admitting to having "been wrong about the linkages of moments, and about what was preliminary and what was primary." It was, he thinks, "a mistake, one I would not make again." Yet surely other mistakes will replace it.

In the acknowledgments to Women with Men, Ford ended with his gratitude to Richard Yates, "a writer too little appreciated." It's worth noting that no American writer has been more assiduous in making stories and novels out of the mistakes of his male protagonists than Yates, to the extent that it becomes programmatic. Ford, I think, is aware of that danger, and attempts--more so than in Women with Men--to diffuse and make less blatant the comeuppances doled out to his heroes. The way he does it in the last three (and longest) tales is to provide the woman--spouse or lover--equal time and capacities for making and getting into trouble. These stories are impressive in their variety of finely worked-up settings: Montreal (in "Dominion"); coastal Maine (in "Charity"); Phoenix and the Grand Canyon (in "Abyss"). The woman in each is a dissatisfied, unreconciled victim of an affair coming to its end, or of a marriage headed for the rocks, or of an adulterous relationship that, with the Grand Canyon in view, turns sour indeed.

Ford's women in these tales are strikingly more complicated than their accompanying men--more daring in their imagining of possibilities, even as these possibilities bring destructive consequences. In "Charity" a married couple, Tom and Nancy Marshall, take a trip to Maine in the wake of Tom's confessed adultery for which, more than once, he has said he's sorry. The wife knows this already: "Tom wasn't a man distanced from what he felt. He didn't say something and then start thinking what it could mean now that he'd said it, finally concluding it didn't mean anything. He was a good, sincere man." In this sense the women are not "sincere" but distanced rather from their feelings, thus impelled to act in unpredictable ways. So the about-to-be-disposed-of mistress in "Dominion" kicks back by playing an unsettling trick on her love; while in "Abyss," surely the most disturbing of the stories, Frances Bilandic, on the edge of the Grand Canyon, leaves her now-despised lover Howard in a manner he had in no way prepared for.

Although these concluding stories are the weightiest, Ford isn't wholly glued to one thematic line: "Puppy," for example, is an engaging study of how to deal with and feel about a stray animal left at your door; "Creche" is both a sober and comic account of Christmas spent at a vulgar ski resort condo in upper Michigan (Bobbie Ann Mason moved north). But mainly the stories are dedicated to giving their inhabitants a complicatedly bad time, and as with other badtimers like Yeats or Robert Stone (whom Ford more than once reminded me of), "life" may get simplified and reduced in the process. The husband in "Under the Radar" realizes "that he didn't really know his wife at all...and that in fact the entire conception of knowing another person--of trust, of closeness, of marriage itself--was completely out of date, defunct." One wonders if Richard Ford, for all his expert, resourceful inventiveness, hasn't taken over this assumption in too unilateral a way.

William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College. Among his many books is Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews (University of Massachusetts Press).

COPYRIGHT 2002 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group