A Multitude of Sins
Richard Ford
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 037572656X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
One of the most celebrated and unflinching chroniclers of modern life now explores, in this masterful collection of short stories, the grand theme of intimacy, love, and their failures.
With remarkable insight and candor, Richard Ford examines liaisons in and out and to the sides of marriage. An illicit visit to the Grand Canyon reveals a vastness even more profound. A couple weekending in Maine try to recapture the ardor that has disappeared from their life together. And on a spring evening, a young wife tells her husband of her affair with the host of the dinner party they’re about to join. The rigorous intensity Ford brings to these vivid, unforgettable dramas marks this as his most powerfully arresting book to date–confirming the judgment of the New York Times Book Review that “nobody now writing looks more like an American classic.”
the little wire gate on the cage I’d bought, just to see him. And he jumped at her and snapped at her and started barking. He just barked and barked. And this Mrs. Myers looked horrified and said, ‘Why, whatever in the world’s wrong with it?’ ‘It’s afraid,’ I said to her. ‘It’s just a puppy. Someone’s abandoned it. It doesn’t understand anything. Haven’t you ever had that happen to you?’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘And we can’t take an abandoned puppy anyway.’ She was looking at me as though I
he would never know what, she either would not have understood a word of it or simply would’ve said, “Well, okay, that’s fine.” When people talked about the bottom line, Steven Reeves thought, they weren’t talking about money, they were talking about what this meant, this kind of fatal ignorance. Money—losing it, gaining it, spending it, hoarding it—all that was only an emblem, though a good one, of what was happening here right now. At this moment a pair of car lights rounded a curve somewhere
him, he could promise her that such as this would never happen again. Tom brought his large blue cop’s eyes up off the table and sought hers. His face—always to Nancy a craggy, handsome face, a face with large cheek bones, deep eye sockets, a thick chin and overlarge white teeth—looked at that moment more like a skull, a death’s head. Not really, of course; she didn’t see an actual death’s head like on a pirate flag. But it was the thought she experienced, and the words: “Tom’s face is a death’s
comes before somebody. Somebody always comes after.” She paused as if she wanted to say something more about that but then didn’t. “Why don’t we eat,” she said, and began to move along toward the restaurant’s glass doors, which were just at that moment opening again onto the street. At dinner she talked about everything that came in her head. She said they should go dancing tonight, that she knew a place only a cab ride away. A black neighborhood. She asked if Wales liked dancing at all. He
he wasn’t crazy about how she came off in her white shorts (too tight) and her blue blouse with the dopey, hand-painted anchor. She looked like a little Polack—somebody who sold cheap houses to other Polacks and bought her clothes at Target. She was too muscular, too—like somebody on the Polish gymnastics team. Somebody named Magda. Her body wasn’t that great to touch. He preferred softer, less toned-up women like his wife. Though Frances was older and, he assumed, had to take better care of