A MULTITUDE OF SINS; by Richard Ford; Knopf, 286 pages; $25.
After a lapse of four years, the gifted novelist Richard Ford, who first catapulted to fame with "The Sportswriter" in 1986 and then won a Pulitzer Prize for "Independence Day" in 1995, has now produced "A Multitude of Sins" — an extraordinary collection of 10 short stories, each distinctive and all diverse.
The settings vary from Michigan to Maine, New Orleans to Montreal, Grand Central to the Grand Canyon. Almost always the common theme is the complex but rich relationships between men and women.
All the stories explore the magnitude of sin in human lives — and most imply distinctive and provocative morals that linger in the reader's mind. Ford writes with an unusual intensity and mastery of the language. His vocabulary is substantial, and his ability to create sentences is lyrical. Although he develops his characters fully enough for the reader to visualize them, he never uses the same characterization twice.
The stories literally tingle with an underlying excitement as the plot develops, and surprises regularly surface that jar the reader to greater satisfaction. There are no gimmicks here — just fine writing that is gripping and gracefully conceived. Like real life, the stories often leave the reader with a feeling of ambivalence.
In the first story, "Privacy," Ford explores the increasingly important problem of protecting the sanctity of one's own thoughts. In "Quality Time," he tries to find out why the principals would engage in adultery and what they get from it. There is a philosophical twist to the story, but it clarifies rather than obscures.
In "Calling," Ford re-connects the lives of an abandoned son with his financially successful but morally bereft father during a strange fishing trip. In a short time, the reader is able to identify with the feelings of the young man as he analyzes his father's ambiguous and tenuous hold on him. The story strengthens the reader's desire for family solidarity and civility.
In "Reunion," a man has a chance meeting with the embittered husband of the woman with whom he had an affair almost two years earlier. The meeting is predictably awkward. In typically pungent Ford prose, the man describes the woman's resemblance to "a 40s Hollywood glamour girl," a quality he finds "attractive, although it often causes her to seem to be spying on her own conversations."
Her husband, on the other hand, uses "a voice you would use to speak to someone in line beside you at the post office," including a "juiciness " in his speech, a hint of "some minor, undispersable moisture in his cheek that one heard in his s's and f's. It was unfortunate, since it robbed him of a small measure of gravity."
In "Under the Radar," a young woman uses an automobile ride to dinner with another couple to break some disturbing news to her husband. She once had an affair with the man whose home they are about to visit. Quickly disoriented, her husband pulls off the road and tries to come to grips emotionally with her announcement. The key to the suspenseful climax is an innocent raccoon thrown into the couple's view after being recklessly hit by a car driving in the opposite direction.
Both "Dominion" and "Abyss" tell riveting stories of couples trapped in destructive, adulterous relationships. The characters and the situations are entirely different, but a delicious surprise factor caps off each story and causes a light to dawn. Both make the very act of adultery seem a huge, heinous mistake that has a ruinous effect on the lives of each person involved.
"A Multitude of Sins" is a richly written book with telling impact.
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com