Typical Ford: earnest, labored, only intermittently illuminated by vivid characters and convincing impressions of the...
Actually, it’s a single sin: adultery and its “multitude” of consequences, explored with varying success in this dour collection of nine stories and a novella, Ford’s third such, following Rock Springs (1997) and Women Without Men (1987).
The weakness of these stories (and Ford’s signal failing as a writer) is monotony. His characters almost all act and sound essentially alike. They’re guilty, evasive, self-justifying misbehavers. Yet this volume does attempt to work fresh variations on its potentially limiting theme: in an atypically tightly plotted vignette, for example, about an unfaithful wife’s confession, her stricken husband’s angry response, and the way she deals with him (“Under the Radar”); and in the novella “Abyss,” where an adulterous pair of realtors’ “business trip” to the Grand Canyon leads to a (totally unconvincing) melodramatic end. Elsewhere, Ford observes the breakup of a morose journalist’s affair with a married woman painter (“Quality Time”); a middle-aged man’s reminiscence of a duck-hunting expedition with his vagrant, cowardly father, who had abandoned the narrator and his mother for another man (“Calling”); and a Canadian woman who hires an actor to impersonate her husband, as a way of controlling her American lover (in the exquisitely titled “Dominion,” which is nevertheless flawed by coy indirect references to the “game” thus being played). Two stories rise above the general level of uninspired competence: a knowing revelation of the calculated innocence with which an adulterous ex-cop slowly destroys his wife’s impulse to forgive him (“Tom championed some preposterous idea for the sole purpose of having her reject it so that he could then do what he wanted to anyway”); and the superb “Puppy,” in which the unwelcome presence of a stray mutt exacerbates a complacent professional couple’s buried fears—until the unoffending creature becomes “a casualty of the limits we all place on our sympathy and our capacity for the ambiguous in life.”
Typical Ford: earnest, labored, only intermittently illuminated by vivid characters and convincing impressions of the variety of their lives.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41212-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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