The nine stories in the volume deal largely with death and divorce among aging middle-class Americans, and the interior narratives of regret and disappointment that preoccupy them.[1][2][3]
Literary critic Rand Richards Cooper in the New York Times praises the stories for their “trenchant and at times thrillingly downbeat realism.” Cooper defends Ford against those reviewers who would disparage his work as merely “well-crafted, writing-class” stories. He extols the stories for their “acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions.”[4]
Literary critic Erica Wagner, writing for The Guardian, describes the quality of the collection as “uneven,” and faults Ford for “a laziness of observation which mars” most of the stories.[5]
Wagner reserves praise for exactly one of the stories, “the one that’s worth waiting for” at the end of the volume: “Second Language.”[6] From a feminist perspective, the reviewer detects a weakness for “slack” character portraits, particularly in Ford's treatment of his female protagonists.[7] Wagner laments that Ford, whose work “has always been distinguished by the precision of his observation and his thoughtful dissection of American life” is here largely limited to examining the “tribulations” of aging middle-class males, in treatments devoid of “wisdom and sensitivity.”[8]
Writing in The Southern Review of Books, critic Christopher Linforth calls the stories “dazzling” in their in “theme and variation”, placing these works in the realm of those written by Irish novelist William Trevor, but in Ford's treatment generating a “greater sense of irony and disenchantment, that the characters’ lives could have been more.”[9]
Locating the volume’s themes in “Death, divorce, ageing and the whiff of disappointment of lives lived and misunderstood” critic Katie Law at The Standard offers this decisive approbation:
“Ford’s idiosyncratic style conveys his characters’ bafflements, both with each other and themselves, and sentences demand careful reading and occasional rereading…The writing is full of the most marvellous gems, absolute truths that linger long after finishing the stories.”[10]
Style
Literary critic Rand Richards Cooper notes the influence of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Ford's “sparkling” prose and “nimble interior monologues.”[11]
From the first story in the collection, “Nothing to Declare,” Cooper cites this “Hemingwayesque” passage:
He had thought about her every single day. Though he’d thought about many other things as often. To be thinking about something didn’t mean what people said it meant.[12][13]
From the same story, Cooper detects an echo from Fitzgerald:
They were at the great river now, where the air expanded and went outward, floated up and away in a limitless moment before returning to the vast, curving, mythical, lusterless flood.[14][15]
Cooper declares that Ford is among the last of that generation of American writers directly influenced by the great post-World War I American literary stylists.[16]
Footnotes
↑ Law, 2020: “Death, divorce, ageing and the whiff of disappointment of lives lived and misunderstood stalk the pages of Richard Ford’s new short story collection.”
↑ Linforth, 2021: “Regret and discontentment figure heavily in the stories and often manifest in deaths and divorces and past affairs, and in the people who have vanished along the way.”
↑ Cooper, 2020: “His new story collection features people taking the measure of old regrets, and sampling rancors that have lost their bitterness with time.”
↑ Wagner, 2020: “‘Second Language’ is the strongest piece in this uneven book, yet there is still a laziness of observation which also mars” the other stories.
↑ Wagner, 2020: “Second Language”...“is the one that’s worth waiting for.”
↑ Wagner, 2020: “Women fare worse when it comes to this kind of slack description.”
↑ Wagner, 2020: “Most of these narratives concern the tribulations of middle-aged, middle-class men who find that life hasn’t quite worked out as they’d planned…In earlier books Ford has painted these kinds of lives with wisdom and sensitivity; here, the characters’ resistance to emotional depth leaks out into the narrative.”
↑ Linforth, 2021; “Indeed, the collection conveys a sense that Ford…is masterfully playing with theme and variation.”
Alice O'Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-born American author and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, Rand achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays.
Judith Blume is an American writer of children's, young adult, and adult fiction. Blume began writing in 1959 and has published more than 26 novels. Among her best-known works are Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. (1970), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Deenie (1973), and Blubber (1974). Blume's books have significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals The English Review and The Transatlantic Review were important in the development of early 20th-century English and American literature.
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2024, Powers has published fourteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story author, and writer of a series of novels featuring the character Frank Bascombe.
The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. It portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.
William Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
Richard Walden Yates was an American fiction writer identified with the mid-century "Age of Anxiety." His first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award, while his first short story collection, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, brought comparisons to James Joyce. Critical acclaim for his writing, however, was not reflected in commercial success during his lifetime.
Dubravka Ugrešić was a Yugoslav-Croatian and Dutch writer. A graduate of University of Zagreb, she was based in Amsterdam from 1996 and continued to identify as a Yugoslav writer.
Diane Johnson is an American novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living in contemporary France. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Persian Nights in 1988.
Felice Picano is an American writer, publisher, and critic who has encouraged the development of gay literature in the United States. His work is documented in many sources.
Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories is a collection of 12 works of short fiction by John Updike. The stories first appeared in The New Yorker and were included in the volume published by Fawcett Publications in 1979
Richard Weston Burgin was an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic. He published nineteen books, and from 1996 through 2013 was a professor of Communications and English at Saint Louis University. He was also the founder and publisher of the internationally distributed award-winning literary magazine Boulevard.
The Anatomy Lesson (1995) is a novel by John David Morley, inspired by Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
Kill Your Darlings (KYD) is an Australian online literary magazine dedicated to arts and culture based in Melbourne. Established in March 2010, the magazine publishes new fiction and commentary, memoir, interviews and reviews. As of 2022 the publishing director is Rebecca Starford, and the editor is Alan Vaarwerk.
Phil Klay is an American writer. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2014 for his first book-length publication, a collection of short stories, Redeployment. In 2014 the National Book Foundation named him a 5 under 35 honoree. His 2020 novel, Missionaries, was named as one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year as well as one of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year.
The Whore's Child and Other Stories is a collection of seven short stories by American author Richard Russo, published in 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was published after Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls hence gained considerable attention and many, mostly favorable reviews.
Deesha Philyaw is an American author, columnist, and public speaker.
Claire Armitstead FRSL is a British journalist and author. She is Associate Editor (Culture) at The Guardian, where she has worked since 1992. She is also a cultural commentator on literature and the arts, and makes appearances on radio and television, as well as leading workshops and chairing literary events in the UK and at international festivals. She has judged literary competitions including the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the PEN Pinter Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Nothing to Declare is a work of short fiction by Richard Ford first appearing in the collection Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories in 2020, and published by Ecco Press. Two former lovers, Sandy McGuinness and Alix, suddenly cross paths after thirty-five years. The story examines the limits of memory, and the regrets and discontentments that emerge from reexamining life’s inflection points.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
