Rock Springs

Richard Ford writes stories somewhat like Raymond Carver, only with more of an edge. Set mostly in the towns and rural areas of Montana, his stories are about characters who have survived against the odds - busted marriages, unemployment, jail terms, and a kind of bleak aimlessness. Some struggle to hold onto an identity that will maintain their self respect and some sense of security, but it's often slipping away as life's lessons leave them typically empty-handed. In the title story, a man with a small daughter hopes to start a new life with a new girlfriend and a stolen Mercedes. In another story, a boy watches his parents' marriage come unglued as a young man only a few years older drives off into the night with the boy's mother. Two boys skip school to spend the day with a girl who has run away from home and has spent the previous night in a motel with the married father of one of them. A young man is escorted by his former wife and her new husband to the police, where he reluctantly turns himself in after robbing a convenience store. A game of canasta is interrupted in a young boy's home when his father punches another man in the chest and kills him. A man in a wheelchair goes fishing and discovers that his line is snared in the carcass of a deer. In another story, a biker has a vanity plate on his Harley with the word LOSER. Children and teenagers figure in many of Ford's stories. They are witnesses to the disintegrating lives of the adults who try awkwardly and often unsuccessfully to care for them. All in their innocence or their growing awareness of the world seem destined to lives of loneliness and confusion like their parents. Who they are becomes no more than a thin boundary between bad luck and diminished dreams, muted by the temporary relief of alcohol, sex, and either a groundless optimism or a fatalistic surrender to futility. This is an interesting book to read along with Mary Clearman Blue's "All But the Waltz," which describes the tough survivors among Montana homesteaders who were confronted by unimaginable bad luck during the 1920s and 1930s and found the resources within themselves to persevere. Only a generation or two later, Ford's characters seem made of lesser stuff, as though circumstances have reduced a pioneering spirit to exhaustion. Ford is a terrific storyteller. These are wonderfully written stories that for the most part let characters speak for themselves as they puzzle over the meaning of what's happening to them. A sexual tension pervades many of the stories, along with a poignancy that allows characters to preserve a degree of dignity, even as they behave foolishly.

Stark, beautiful, sad, mysterious, understated, real-seeming, drum taut. Almost word perfect. ROCK SPRINGS is easily Ford's best book. I've taught creative writing and contemporary lit. at several universities. Some of the best prose ever written has been published in the past couple of decades. A few of my other favorite contemporary books in no particular order:THE NIGHT IN QUESTION, Tobias Wolff (the richest, roundest, most mature collection of stories by the world's best short fiction writer); THE TAO OF MUHAMMAD ALI: A FATHERS AND SONS MEMOIR, Davis Miller (a remarkable, dreamy, beautiful nonfiction novel by a fairly unheralded American who's quite well appreciated in the UK: London reviewers have compared Miller's books to those of R. Ford, T. Wolff and Nick Hornby [HIGH FIDELITY, FEVER PITCH]); THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, Tim O'Brien (jaw-droppingly well written, timeless feeling); TRACKS, Louise Erdrich (for me, the best -- and most real-world mythical -- in her interrelated series of novels).I can't imagine a more dynamic, life-affirming, entertaining group of books than those I've listed above. Happy reading, everyone!

There is something sweet and wise and honest in these stories, in even in their apparent lack of sentimentality. There is a feeling for Flaubert's 'fundamental accuracy of detail,' a feeling for raw moments of honest life. Without moralizing or drying up there are moments here when we understand life as it is, perhaps not as we want it to be. In this brilliant collection and its accompanying addendum, the novella Wildlife, which Ford told me was the extension, the last getting out of the idea, there is such tender honesty, and raw facts particularly showing the moments his teenage male protagonists realize their parents are flawed pained people striving for things, not getting there, doing what they say is wrong, living life, and that is what life is. Optomists breaks my heart.

Rock Springs is a million miles from home if home ever existed in the first place. Home is dead, demolished, forever lost. Richard Ford knows more than he lets on. He tells interviewers that he only imagines the lives of his characters, and knows nothing of them--looks upon them from the outside. And why wouldn't he be telling the truth? After all, he is a card carrying member of The Literati. He rides the circuit, does readings, and swims with academics.Still, for some reason, Ford can't help but write about people spun loose from everyday life. His characters are always on the run or are the victims of irrevocable mistakes and tragic events. It's an arid and empty place high up in the attic of the mind where Ford takes his readers. His books aren't for everyone. Readers who feel the need for warm loving characters engaged with life and living in the bosom of the family won't understand Richard Ford. He takes us to a place where a person is most alone and then exposes us to the achingly lost world of spirtual isolation.Rock Springs is populated by loss and alienation against a backdrop of achingly beautiful every day life. Ford's protagonists are continually immersed in a transitory form of immediate experience, and continually offer themselves up to the dark seduction of fate. The magic of these stories is that they are told from the point of view of people overwhelmed by the cascade of events in their lives. Every sentence is immaculate in its spare purpose. Ford is no mere storyteller. Ford is an immense talent and Rock Springs is a must read.

Simply put, Richard Ford is the finest writer of short fiction in America today. When first published in the 1980s, Rock Springs did not get the attention it rightly deserved, but since Ford has won the Pulitzer, this collection is once again being sapped up. This collection outweighs Ford's lates - Women With Men - because it has that one base ingrediant the other lacks: a heart. Ford tells a series of stories about the great American vastness and the sense of hopelessnes that seems to permeate much of the West. In doing so, Ford evokes character just as memorable as any in contemporary literature - including his own Frank Bascomb. This collection is a must read for aspiring writers who want to know how to create emotion without melodrama. Also, it creates voices rather than imitating them. A mark of a true master. When I first read this collection in college, it seemed like I was sitting around the fire listening to a storyteller. The characters are vibrant, the setting as gritty as they need to be, and the writing as polished as fine silver. Purchase this book and understand what the word "mastery" means.