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    A Multitude of Sins
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    A Multitude of Sins
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    A Multitude of Sins
    Ebook353 pages6 hours

    A Multitude of Sins

    By Richard Ford

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    About this ebook

    In each of these tales master storyteller Richard Ford is drawn to the themes of intimacy, love, and their failures. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound; an exacting career woman celebrates Christmas with her adamantly post-nuclear family; a couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardour that has disappeared, both gradually and suddenly, from their lives; on a spring evening's drive, a young wife confesses to her husband the affair she had with the host of the dinner party they're about to join.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 4, 2012
    ISBN9781408835067
    Unavailable
    A Multitude of Sins
    Author

    Richard Ford

    Richard Ford is the author of The Sportswriter; Independence Day, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Lay of the Land; and the New York Times bestseller Canada. His short story collections include the bestseller Let Me Be Frank With You, Sorry for Your Trouble, Rock Springs and A Multitude of Sins, which contain many widely anthologized stories. He lives in New Orleans with his wife Kristina Ford.

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    • 4/5
      The stories collected here reveal Ford in his full mastery of the short form. Always unsettling, always turning away from the direct path. Ford’s characters are always undercutting themselves, and their intentions, second guessing, as it were, their own second guesses. It is a deliberative technique, so much so that at times the reader feels, here, that the technique takes precedence over the characters and their stories. And yet, even unsettled and unsettling, Ford remains vital and needs to be read.Some of the stories are near classics. “Puppy” takes the unwanted abandonment of a dog within a couple’s fenced-in property as the catalyst for the disintegration of their relationship. “Crèche” is even more disastrous, in personal terms, as a broken extended family breaks even further during a misguided Christmas skiing vacation. “Under the Radar” is both unnerving and violent, explosively so as a wife confesses to having had an affair with the host of dinner party to which the couple are on route. Violence ensues but it isn’t entirely the anticipated violence. And there is just a hint that it might be a mercy, or at least no great deviation from nature.The final long story (or short novella), “Abyss”, follows two real estate agents who are having an affair. Ford masterfully moves from one character’s point of view to the other’s in extremely close proximity, at times from one sentence to the next. Their actions, of course, define them, as the one character notes, but beyond that there are their words and behind their words, thoughts and intentions. Ford shows how what they say is often, perhaps always, undercut by what they think or intend, and both stand at odds with what they do. For characters so out of touch with their authentic being, it might be no surprise that a great abyss lies before them, though in this case it is the Grand Canyon itself. In another writer it might have turned into pathetic fallacy, but with Ford it blows past that risk and moves on to something altogether different.There are very few characters to identify with in these stories, fewer still to feel sympathetic towards, and yet the writing is never less than compelling. Recommended, as ever.
    • 4/5
      All of the short stories concern marriage and infidelity, painting marriage as bleak intimacy and infidelity as a banal detour that never gets you what you want. In ways reminiscent of Updike, Ford takes a scalpel to the relationships between men and women portrayed in this book. Definitely well-written, but towards the end the hopelessness with which the subject matter is explored becomes tedious and a little depressing.