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blazenaat's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
arsuoy's review against another edition
4.0
Got this for free started reading for shits and giggles and it's surprisingly really good.
jennyshank's review against another edition
3.0
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2002/feb/01/adultery-is-new-again-in-sins/
Adultery is new again in 'Sins'
Ford rescues an old subject from the jaws of cliche
Jenny Shank, Special to the News
Published February 1, 2002 at midnight
In many ways, the literature of adultery hit its peak with Anna Karenina and went downhill from there, though that hasn't stopped dozens of American writers from building their careers on the exploration of violations of the Seventh Commandment. Indeed, a whole generation of writers, headed by the towering and much-Pulitzered triumvirate of John Updike, Phillip Roth, and Richard Ford, has focused intently on adultery in its fiction.
It was perhaps easier to create a potent story about this topic when Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy were writing their great adultery narratives. The stakes were grave then, and in choosing to be faithful to their spouses or not, the characters in these books were making the very choice between heaven and hell. These writers took such choices absolutely seriously, focusing on adultery not to titillate but to make moral sparks fly, and the consequence was that their books were initially banned and decried nearly as often as they were praised.
Literary taboos gradually loosened, of course, and then the '60s happened. From that time on, adultery became increasingly more common in fiction, to such an extent that now it's more surprising to encounter a story in The New Yorker about a married couple that doesn't cheat on each other than about one that does.
So it's difficult, this late in history, to write about adultery in a fresh way, as its shock value has diminished, and it's certainly difficult to write about it with the degree of moral heft and substance that has illustrious precedence in the genre. But in his new collection of short stories, A Multitude of Sins, Ford does a fine job of it.
Each story in A Multitude of Sins has to do with adultery, though each leads its characters to a distinct moral precipice, and Ford creates such an array of characters, settings and situations that the topic doesn't get dull. A mark of the freshness of Ford's approach is that he mercifully didn't write any stories about young, nubile college girls sleeping with wizened brainiac professors. The characters in Ford's stories are hardly the stuff of fantasy -- they have hair that "tended to dry unruliness" or that is "thinning a little in front," and one poor guy has "enormous feet with their giant gray toenails hard as tungsten."
The humanity of Ford's characters draws you toward them, even as their actions repel. Ford makes the reader care about people who are doing bad, bad things, even if you'd never want to actually meet them for fear they'd do these things to you.
The highlight of the collection is Calling, the story of a New Orleans boy whose father abandoned him and his mother for his rich, gay lover in St. Louis. The father, Boatwright McKendall, returns to take his son duck hunting for a day. McKendall is an amusing dandy to watch from the sidelines, where we're free from the heartache he causes his family. He gives sage Oscar Wilde-esque advice to his son, such as: "The world wants to operate on looks. It only uses brains if looks aren't available."
McKendall sends a cab instead of picking up his son for hunting and shows up drunk at the pier. McKendall explains, "I couldn't locate my proper hunting attire," and wears instead "a tuxedo with a pink shirt, a bright-red bow tie and a pink carnation." It's what some have called an Irish moment, painfully funny and sad at the same time.
The son narrates all this from many years hence, after his mother and father have died. Reflecting on his father, he makes an observation that encapsulates all the stories in this collection: "My father did only what pleased him, and believed that doing so permitted others the equal freedom to do what they wanted. Only that isn't how the world works, as my mother's life and mine were living proof. Other people affect you. It's really no more complicated than that."
But the effects people's choices have on others can be extremely complicated, as Ford demonstrates in other stories in A Multitude of Sins. In Puppy, a pack of sullen Goth kids leave an angry puppy in the yard of a rich New Orleans couple, and the couple's decisions about how to get rid of the dog are a coded way of expressing to each other undiscussed facets of their marriage -- yes, you guessed it, one of them has had an affair.
In Under the Radar, the shortest, tightest, most dramatic story in the collection, a ditsy wife tells her husband that she's had an affair with the host of the party they're driving to, and two shocking brutalities result.
In Creche, Faith, a successful Hollywood lawyer, treats her mother, her sister's husband, Roger, and his two children to a Christmas stay at a Michigan ski resort. The missing sister is in rehab and has treated her family horribly, partying, doing drugs and taking up with a biker boyfriend who's now incarcerated. On top of that, Faith's mother has become grossly obese, and Roger is lecherous and unlikable. Still, Faith tries to put the best face on things and contemplates taking her nieces with her to live in California.
Ford does an excellent job of capturing the sordid truth that keeps coming out from under the veneer of holiday cheer that Faith tries to maintain with this description of the dining hall at the lodge: "In a room that can conveniently hold five hundred souls, there are perhaps fifteen scattered diners. No one is eating family style, only solos and twos. Young lodge employees in paper caps wait dismally behind the long smorgasbord steam table. Metal heat lamps with orange beams are steadily overcooking the prime rib, of which Roger has taken a goodly portion."
While there are plenty of moments of excellent writing like this in A Multitude Of Sins, there are also missteps. Ford is sometimes prone to stilted phrasing, as in this sentence from Quality Time: "He'd lately realized he'd been away too long, had lost touch with things American."
Later in the same story, which is about an international journalist who's lecturing in Chicago for a few months and the affair he starts with a married, middle-aged woman, Ford writes, "He knew, of course, that when women came to lectures, they came wanting something -- conceivably something innocent -- but something, always."
Just what is that supposed to mean? That women never come to lectures just to learn from them as men do? Ford does nothing to indicate that the character thinking this is supposed to be considered repugnant, so with that sentence he comes perilously close to introducing the professor-chasing-college-girl trope.
Another drawback of Ford's consistent focus on adultery is that toward the end of the book, where there's a story that doesn't mention an affair until five pages in, it's hard to pay attention to what's going on, because the reader thinks, "OK, where is it? Who did it this time?"
Still, by exploring the confrontations that result from affairs and by introducing grave consequences that stem from even the most casual extramarital fling in A Multitude of Sins, Ford has returned high seriousness and originality to a topic that had threatened to become banal window dressing in contemporary fiction. His characters are, for the most part, more Karenina than sorority girl, and the stories that house them are consequently well worth reading.
Adultery is new again in 'Sins'
Ford rescues an old subject from the jaws of cliche
Jenny Shank, Special to the News
Published February 1, 2002 at midnight
In many ways, the literature of adultery hit its peak with Anna Karenina and went downhill from there, though that hasn't stopped dozens of American writers from building their careers on the exploration of violations of the Seventh Commandment. Indeed, a whole generation of writers, headed by the towering and much-Pulitzered triumvirate of John Updike, Phillip Roth, and Richard Ford, has focused intently on adultery in its fiction.
It was perhaps easier to create a potent story about this topic when Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy were writing their great adultery narratives. The stakes were grave then, and in choosing to be faithful to their spouses or not, the characters in these books were making the very choice between heaven and hell. These writers took such choices absolutely seriously, focusing on adultery not to titillate but to make moral sparks fly, and the consequence was that their books were initially banned and decried nearly as often as they were praised.
Literary taboos gradually loosened, of course, and then the '60s happened. From that time on, adultery became increasingly more common in fiction, to such an extent that now it's more surprising to encounter a story in The New Yorker about a married couple that doesn't cheat on each other than about one that does.
So it's difficult, this late in history, to write about adultery in a fresh way, as its shock value has diminished, and it's certainly difficult to write about it with the degree of moral heft and substance that has illustrious precedence in the genre. But in his new collection of short stories, A Multitude of Sins, Ford does a fine job of it.
Each story in A Multitude of Sins has to do with adultery, though each leads its characters to a distinct moral precipice, and Ford creates such an array of characters, settings and situations that the topic doesn't get dull. A mark of the freshness of Ford's approach is that he mercifully didn't write any stories about young, nubile college girls sleeping with wizened brainiac professors. The characters in Ford's stories are hardly the stuff of fantasy -- they have hair that "tended to dry unruliness" or that is "thinning a little in front," and one poor guy has "enormous feet with their giant gray toenails hard as tungsten."
The humanity of Ford's characters draws you toward them, even as their actions repel. Ford makes the reader care about people who are doing bad, bad things, even if you'd never want to actually meet them for fear they'd do these things to you.
The highlight of the collection is Calling, the story of a New Orleans boy whose father abandoned him and his mother for his rich, gay lover in St. Louis. The father, Boatwright McKendall, returns to take his son duck hunting for a day. McKendall is an amusing dandy to watch from the sidelines, where we're free from the heartache he causes his family. He gives sage Oscar Wilde-esque advice to his son, such as: "The world wants to operate on looks. It only uses brains if looks aren't available."
McKendall sends a cab instead of picking up his son for hunting and shows up drunk at the pier. McKendall explains, "I couldn't locate my proper hunting attire," and wears instead "a tuxedo with a pink shirt, a bright-red bow tie and a pink carnation." It's what some have called an Irish moment, painfully funny and sad at the same time.
The son narrates all this from many years hence, after his mother and father have died. Reflecting on his father, he makes an observation that encapsulates all the stories in this collection: "My father did only what pleased him, and believed that doing so permitted others the equal freedom to do what they wanted. Only that isn't how the world works, as my mother's life and mine were living proof. Other people affect you. It's really no more complicated than that."
But the effects people's choices have on others can be extremely complicated, as Ford demonstrates in other stories in A Multitude of Sins. In Puppy, a pack of sullen Goth kids leave an angry puppy in the yard of a rich New Orleans couple, and the couple's decisions about how to get rid of the dog are a coded way of expressing to each other undiscussed facets of their marriage -- yes, you guessed it, one of them has had an affair.
In Under the Radar, the shortest, tightest, most dramatic story in the collection, a ditsy wife tells her husband that she's had an affair with the host of the party they're driving to, and two shocking brutalities result.
In Creche, Faith, a successful Hollywood lawyer, treats her mother, her sister's husband, Roger, and his two children to a Christmas stay at a Michigan ski resort. The missing sister is in rehab and has treated her family horribly, partying, doing drugs and taking up with a biker boyfriend who's now incarcerated. On top of that, Faith's mother has become grossly obese, and Roger is lecherous and unlikable. Still, Faith tries to put the best face on things and contemplates taking her nieces with her to live in California.
Ford does an excellent job of capturing the sordid truth that keeps coming out from under the veneer of holiday cheer that Faith tries to maintain with this description of the dining hall at the lodge: "In a room that can conveniently hold five hundred souls, there are perhaps fifteen scattered diners. No one is eating family style, only solos and twos. Young lodge employees in paper caps wait dismally behind the long smorgasbord steam table. Metal heat lamps with orange beams are steadily overcooking the prime rib, of which Roger has taken a goodly portion."
While there are plenty of moments of excellent writing like this in A Multitude Of Sins, there are also missteps. Ford is sometimes prone to stilted phrasing, as in this sentence from Quality Time: "He'd lately realized he'd been away too long, had lost touch with things American."
Later in the same story, which is about an international journalist who's lecturing in Chicago for a few months and the affair he starts with a married, middle-aged woman, Ford writes, "He knew, of course, that when women came to lectures, they came wanting something -- conceivably something innocent -- but something, always."
Just what is that supposed to mean? That women never come to lectures just to learn from them as men do? Ford does nothing to indicate that the character thinking this is supposed to be considered repugnant, so with that sentence he comes perilously close to introducing the professor-chasing-college-girl trope.
Another drawback of Ford's consistent focus on adultery is that toward the end of the book, where there's a story that doesn't mention an affair until five pages in, it's hard to pay attention to what's going on, because the reader thinks, "OK, where is it? Who did it this time?"
Still, by exploring the confrontations that result from affairs and by introducing grave consequences that stem from even the most casual extramarital fling in A Multitude of Sins, Ford has returned high seriousness and originality to a topic that had threatened to become banal window dressing in contemporary fiction. His characters are, for the most part, more Karenina than sorority girl, and the stories that house them are consequently well worth reading.
lawyergobblesbooks's review against another edition
5.0
"Reunion" stands in my top three stories of all time. Surprising, because Ford isn't nearly the caliber of other greats in the genre: Carver, Hemingway and the like. He's a hardworking and proficient storyteller.
In "Reunion," however, he creates a world of emotion and memory packaged into a brief chance encounter in the midst of a busy hour at Grand Central Station. He not only introduces us to his protagonist and the long-lost friend who stands in front of them but, in a few powerful pages, manages to embroil us into the story behind the present awkwardness and power of the reunion encounter.
I found this story in a Paris Review back issue in the St. Paul's School library and read the first pages of it dozens of times. It was impossible to finish; faced with such mastery of the form, I rushed back to my dorm room to try and emulate it. I finished it eventually. The ending didn't disappoint; if nothing else Ford has always been neat and satisfying, often in surprising ways, and "Reunion," to me, is his most extraordinary and inspiring work.
In "Reunion," however, he creates a world of emotion and memory packaged into a brief chance encounter in the midst of a busy hour at Grand Central Station. He not only introduces us to his protagonist and the long-lost friend who stands in front of them but, in a few powerful pages, manages to embroil us into the story behind the present awkwardness and power of the reunion encounter.
I found this story in a Paris Review back issue in the St. Paul's School library and read the first pages of it dozens of times. It was impossible to finish; faced with such mastery of the form, I rushed back to my dorm room to try and emulate it. I finished it eventually. The ending didn't disappoint; if nothing else Ford has always been neat and satisfying, often in surprising ways, and "Reunion," to me, is his most extraordinary and inspiring work.
bondebonde's review against another edition
5.0
At first glance, it seems the title is wrong, and that it should read "One sin: adultery" because it shows up almost every other story. But what makes this book so good is that it is really about the many ways people deceive themselves and how it effects their romantic relationships. Ford creates his characters beautifully, it is haunting to notice similarities between yourself and the down-and-out characters. Read a romance novel or childrens book after this one.
edwarde3ddd's review
4.0
I attended a book signing for Richard Ford at the Tattered Cover in 2002 for this collection. While I had read several of these stories, this was the first time I went through methodically and read each one. While expertly crafted, there were not many stories that ended with much sense of redemption for the characters. While that may be the realities of these situations as they play out or the very consequences of sin, the idea of grace and/or redemption as a part of a world view are largely if not completely absent making for a depressing overall impression in the end.
anndouglas's review
4.0
A beautifully written collection of short stories. Features quirky characters who are nonetheless true to life and demonstrates a deep understanding of what motivates people to do right as well as wrong.
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