A Multitude of Sins
Richard Ford Harvill, 278pp, £15.99
ISBN 1860468403
Perhaps the realisation occurs as early as the fourth story, "Reunion", depicting a chance encounter in New York between a publisher and the businessman he once cuckolded. Or perhaps it won't hit you until "Under The Radar", 60 pages later, in which a man driving to a dinner party learns of his wife's fling with their host. But at some point it becomes dispiritingly clear that only one sin links the short fiction collected in A Multitude of Sins: the author of The Sportswriter has turned into The Adultery Writer.
As you would expect, Ford displays agility in coming at infidelity and its repercussions from different angles: lovers meeting in hotels and tiring of quasi-marital liaisons that are starting to stale ("Quality Time", "Dominion", "The Abyss"); a married couple on holiday after the man ends an affair, assessing whether their relationship has a future ("Charity"); the makeshift family left behind by a runaway wife attempting to celebrate Christmas ("Creche"); a teenager duck-shooting with the father who left his mother for another man ("Calling"); a voyeur's adultery of the eye ("Privacy"); the first small rift in a marriage, presaging future betrayals ("Puppy").
Ford provides a further measure of diversity by varying the stories' length - from five-page quickies to a near-novella - and perspective, switching to the third person in the book's second half after initially favouring the first person. Always a powerful evoker of place and its psychological imprint, he strives to alleviate the monotony of subject by setting the tales in an impressive variety of locations, all of them far from the New Jersey suburbia of The Sportswriter and his second, equally outstanding novel featuring Frank Bascombe, Independence Day. The choice of settings suggests the aim of a kind of mapping of America as a nation of betrayers and betrayed, with the cities or regions that characters travel from or grew up in helping to fill in some of the gaps. "The Abyss", the longest tale and the only one not previously published, ends in the Grand Canyon, the symbolic empty heart of the US.
The protagonists, as befits fiction mostly written for the New Yorker, are white, professional and middle-aged; and the tonal range is similarly narrow. The stories advance, elegantly, intelligently and rather old-fashionedly, towards a disconcerting specific recognition - that a relationship is at best musty, at worst dead, or that the malign effects of a past liaison are still lingering - linked to a dismal general truth expressed in more literary language. The remarkably morose author photo on the book jacket, in which Ford has the eyes of a starving wolf at bay, comes to seem increasingly apt as the collection progresses.
What was so attractive about The Sportswriter and Independence Day was the juggling of passion and profession, with many of the most vivid moments devoted to the novelist-manque narrator's jobs as journalist and real-estate salesman.
In A Multitude of Sins, this balance has gone askew. Ford sketches what his cheating and cheated figures do from nine to five with tantalising skill, but never shows them doing it. It's a strange sort of book that tempts you to skip the sex bits - or, more accurately, the pre-sex and post-sex bits. Ford's couples never discuss politics, current affairs, religion, high and popular culture, celebrities, sport or even sex, focusing myopically on their relationship. No wonder they're fed up with one another. But why isn't Ford bored of writing about them?
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