|
After reading this book from cover to cover, you'd think Richard Ford had it wrong. It's not a multitude of sins, it's just one single sin --- adultery. The tales included within Ford's newest short story collection revolve around that one major theme: cheating on the one you "love." But, that one sin is the compilation of a multitude of sins. Before they slept with the person who was not their spouse, they told smaller lies and delved into sins (working late, car trouble, mid-life crisis, in need of something the partner couldn't give) that culminated in adultery. And not only did they sin against someone, they sinned against themselves, always hiding, always having thoughts of regret and recrimination. That is why the title to Richard Ford's collection works --- everyone sins, however small or large, each and every day, and how we deal with these lapses of judgment and how we handle our times when we falter equates to our life's happiness and stability.
Ford, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for INDEPENDENCE DAY, is an excellent writer whose thoughts on the human condition, our foibles and mistakes, joys and warmth, permeate each story. With "Privacy," a man watches a woman undress at night across the street in another apartment. In "Calling," a son comes to terms with his father moving out on his mother to go to St. Louis with his gay lover, while his mother continues down a path of her own with a black man. One of the best stories, "Under the Radar," is a short tale of a woman who has an affair with a family friend, coming clean to her husband about it on the way to that friend's house. "Abyss," the longest (and possibly saddest) story in the collection, is the story of a man and a woman in real estate, cheating on their respective spouses, taking a day trip to the Grand Canyon during a sales conference in Phoenix.
Ford writes about normal men and women (the person you sit next to on the bus, the person you buy coffee from in the morning, the person buying oranges next to you at the grocery store). These normal people make mistakes or make errors in judgment, or perhaps do good or try to do good. These errors, these sins they commit, they hide and shuffle down and divert and deflect. Ford writes of these hidden lives, these diverted facts, and does so brilliantly.
After reading nearly 300 pages about adultery, one might think everyone's story is the same, hardly separating one person's affair with another. This is true and false at the same time. Certainly they are all adulterers, cheating on their spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends, but at the same time, each story is completely and utterly different. Why one person cheats on someone can be very different from why another person does. What makes one person tick doesn't make everyone tick the same way. That is why A MULTITUDE OF SINS is such an important book, it's tick is so unique and still very much the same.
--- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley
 Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2008, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Back to top.
|
