Review by Booklist Review
Set in harsh, beautiful Montana towns, these 10 resonant short stories feature characters so put upon by life that resorting to desperate acts even murder is totally within the realm of possibility. Using supple, atmospheric prose, Ford deftly sketches in each story a complex turn of events leading up to a single rash act that can forever change the course of one's life. In the ironically titled ``Optimists,'' a young boy witnesses his father kill a man, watches his family dissolve, and then has a chance meeting with his estranged mother in a grocery store many years later. In the darkly humorous ``Going to the Dogs,`` a man whose business has recently failed and whose wife has run off with a groom from the local dog track is robbed by two matronly deer hunters. To paraphrase an old blues song, if it weren't for bad luck, these folks wouldn't have much luck at all. In the tradition of Richard Yates, Ford writes harrowing, powerful fiction. JW. [CIP] 87-11564
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The stories in this collection read like textbook exercises in classic short story form: in each, a lifetime of sadness is suddenly crystallized around a momentan image, a discovery, a confrontationafter which a life has been irrevocably, if at first imperceptibly, changed. Ford approaches the genre with reverent precision and delivers an array of haunting, enduring images: a stalled train about to be engulfed in a brushfire; a misdirected collect phone call to a father from a son in trouble; a wounded snow goose swimming circles in a lake that moments before had been covered by the rest of its flock ``like a white bandage laid on the water.'' Together, these portraits of violence and betrayal among the unemployed and unmotivated in rural Montana present an almost relentlessly bleak picture of difficult lives, and the frequent presence of children as witnesses to their parents' disgraces further darkens the vision. It may well be too dark for many readers. The accessible appeal of Ford's most recent novel The Sportswriter is missing here, in large part because the characters lack the wit and perspective that could give voice to their endeavors at self-awareness. Comparisons to Raymond Carver are appropriate, but where Carver's depictions of the basic struggle to make sense out of things strike a universal chord that transcends the narrow focus of the part of the world he examines, Ford's stories only outline that world and remain bounded by its constraints despite their intermittent beauty. First serial to the New Yorker and Vanity Fair; paperback rights to Vintage. (September 28) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Ford's stories can be individually striking, but corralling them lessens the effect: they seem like the same story done over. A man remembers back to the unhappy, inarticulate lives of his Northwestern parents--and finds himself dumbfounded by the melancholy, stoic gravity of living. Or else the same man participates in unsavory rites (illegalities, adulteries) that lead him to be dumbfounded by the melancholy, stoic gravity of living. (It more often than not hits him while fishing.) Many stories here seem like three Raymond Carver stories stitched together, but Ford can never find the shut-off valve before delivering himself of some vague, portentous piety or other: ""What we did, I thought, didn't matter so much. Not to us, or to anyone. . . It was the same, and we were all the same then. She was pushing everything out in order to distinguish the world. It's no worse or better than other ways."" Lawbreaking here is in constant touch with stalemate, someone always dragging along a past that's checkered at best; and in style, Ford's mannerism of the self. consciously hard. boiled comes off as a cross between Raymond Chandler and Hemingway's ""Big Two-Hearted River."" But two stories are quite fine here: ""Empire""--a classically muzzy liaison on a train, where tawdriness seems less the point than grace; and ""Optimists""--true, awful violence is set into the trivial contexts where it really does occur and which it's unable to transcend. Ford's grim meandering serves these best--and makes them the standouts in an otherwise unexceptional collection. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
