The finest and most substantial story here is 'The Run of Yourself'. One could say is has the richness and breadth of a novel, but that would be to slight the short-story form, of which Mr. Ford has repeatedly proved himself a master ... However understated and oblique, Sorry for Your Trouble—which is what Irish people say to the bereaved at a funeral—is both a coherent work of art and a subtle and convincing portrait of contemporary American life among the moneyed middle class. None of the main characters has to worry about money, which highlights the emotional malaise that underlies their lives and their frequent and almost absent-minded couplings and uncouplings. In the background are wars, financial crises, natural vicissitudes. This is America, and Richard Ford is its chronicler. In these superbly wrought tales he catches, with exquisite precision...the irresistible melancholy that is the mark of American life.
... contrasts in scale—individual and historical, intimate and epic—occur throughout the novels of Shirley Hazzard, whose writing, like her name, tends to begin demurely enough, all weak tea and lace curtains, but grows quietly comic, and then abruptly calamitous. Her characters know poetry by heart, believe in honor, and speak in epigrams. Their biographies are revised, drastically, by plane crashes and shipwrecks, fatal battles, and grave illnesses. They travel widely and suffer emotional devastation ... The sentences of shocking wisdom appear freakishly often. The intelligence is relentless. Hazzardians will read Collected Stories with impatient pleasure, reminded from the first page that, once they are through, they can start rereading the novels.
There’s a gamble in using ambivalence as the launching pad for fiction, and a couple of these stories drift and bog down ... as much existential as it is temperamental, reflecting protagonists grappling to relinquish the sense of an overarching narrative in their lives. These are stories about the death of stories ... Ford has a gift for nimble interior monologues and a superb ear for the varieties and vagaries of human speech. His prose can strike a Hemingwayesque cadence ... At 76, Ford is of the last generation of writers to have grown up directly under the Papa-and-Scott dispensation, and it’s gratifying to hear his sentences pay homage ... Acutely described settings, pitch-perfect dialogue, inner lives vividly evoked, complex protagonists brought toward difficult recognitions: There’s a kind of narrative, often dismissed as the 'well-crafted, writing-class story,' that deals in muted epiphanies and trains its gaze inward, to pangs and misgivings. Some readers may no longer admire this kind of story. But I still love it. What is craft, after all, but a good thing well made?
... one of those hybrid affairs, but with a definite upside. It’s more like a twofer: We expect short stories, only to find a couple of novellas tucked in, which nearly steal the show ... Considering the generally dark palette of his themes, there’s a strange joy to this book. Perhaps it emanates from the nearly kinetic ruminations of his characters, who are forever observing their inner climate. And, in the process, they illuminate pieces of themselves for their own use and ours. If many of his characters seem to be sorting out their lives, Ford assigns a clarity to the process that one could only wish for in real life. There’s no muddling through the troubles that beset these folks. They may feel anguish or loss, but they do it with such precision and finesse! All of which makes for an incisive and satisfying read.
... gathers nine stories, all of which fit snugly in the Ford canon, though his characters, unsurprisingly, have grown older and perch higher on the socio-economic ladder ... The prose is terse, the craftsmanship, as always, fine. The reader feels cradled in the capable hands of an expert ... Ford is exact and poetic ... There’s no sign that Ford has ever considered forsaking realism, but it’s possible that Kazin was right, that Ford is not content. That would account for the compulsive drive to tinker, to polish — to perfect.
Ford’s idiosyncratic style conveys his characters’ bafflements, both with each other and themselves, and sentences demand careful reading and occasional rereading. Yet what rewards! The writing is full of the most marvellous gems, absolute truths that linger long after finishing the stories ... That’s always been Ford’s gift: to say such things with such stark clarity. And he does it here superbly.
Ford has always been a reliable source of elegant, thoughtful fiction. Sorry for Your Trouble, his new short story collection, only extends that level of literary quality into the middle of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eighth decade. Every one of the nine stories here reveals the steady hand of a master of the form, practicing his craft with confidence and grace ... Ford excels at piercing the dark heart of loss. There is nothing maudlin or sentimental about his perspective; rather it is a clear-eyed assessment of how we encounter these empty spaces in our lives and, willingly or not, move on ... The two longest stories feel as if they share that same beautiful DNA of longing ... Ford is at his best when he allows carefully paced stories like these room to breathe, like the fine wine one of his characters might consume. For that reason, a couple of the entries, like 'Crossing,' or 'Free Day' aren’t as fully satisfying ... Ford’s writing is distinguished by the economy of its expression, and the seemingly effortless ease with which keen insights slip into his narratives ... One closes the book on a typical Ford story feeling just a bit wiser, more reflective, understanding that for all the pleasure of reading him in the moment, one’s true enjoyment will linger over time.
The title of his new collection, Sorry for Your Trouble, is typical Ford. He takes a platitude seriously, because it’s probably true, and says it with enough meaning or depth of feeling that sincerity itself serves as a kind of irony. (Self-delusion in Ford grades almost imperceptibly into self-insight, and it’s not always clear that the difference counts for much.) ... If the characters in I’m Sorry for Your Trouble are richer than the inhabitants of Rock Springs, they’re older, too—and their lives have turned out, if not well, then acceptably. The long-feared thing has not yet happened, and may never; or, if it has, and the aftermath is heading their way, it will probably pass whether they deal with it or not. As for the reader: I can’t think of many other writers, living or dead, who have given me so many reasons over the years to slow down on the page and pay attention.
... thoughtfulness is too often absent. Characters in stories are entitled to their perceptions of the world and those they observe. But the stories in this book come across as stale because, more often than not, the people in them seem imprisoned by a judgmental authorial voice. Most of these narratives concern the tribulations of middle-aged, middle-class men who find that life hasn’t quite worked out as they’d planned ... In earlier books Ford has painted these kinds of lives with wisdom and sensitivity; here, the characters’ resistance to emotional depth leaks out into the narrative. Henry’s friend Niall in 'Displaced' is...caricature rather than character. What’s intriguing in 'Second Language' is the way in which both Jonathan and Charlotte seem, to a certain extent, to elude their author: that’s what gives them a life beyond the page. The final tale here is the one that’s worth waiting for.
Indelible stories in earlier collections...demonstrate Ford’s keen eye for regional details, as underscored here. Recurrent themes often focus on marginalized characters dealing with personal and professional breakdowns. Throughout all is a dark humor and incisive philosophical spirit that perpetuates an addictive habit for the reader ... The tonal range of the stories here is not wide. It is most often bitter and biting. But the scope of Ford’s sympathetic vision of battered humanity tempers the melancholy nature of a life endured with the compassionate understanding of a life lived.
Richard Ford has a deep understanding of the fact that brevity is the soul of wit. He writes with a sparse beauty ... mostly about men facing hard times with the advance of age and coping with the bewilderment that comes when life doesn't stay true to the best laid plans. His turn of phrase is admirable, even when the outlook is bleak ... a book for the strange days in which we now find ourselves trapped ... There are lots of people in these pages with distinct levels of Irishness, but the real sense permeating the book is of displacement. Ford's people have no sense of belonging. And if that all sounds grim, he writes with a potency that captivates.
You aren’t going to like a lot of these people ... You wouldn’t want to follow any of them all the way through a novel. So Ford cuts from one character to another, painting them all with broad strokes. But that can allow for insights that comically tag great swaths of upper-middle class America ... This reader found himself only mildly intrigued by these characters, perhaps because they seem only mildly intrigued by their own lives. It all makes for a different kind of reading experience. Mr. Ford can paint beautiful scenes, capturing moments we’ve either lived through or are glad we have not ... This is a book you can put down; it’s easy to walk away from it. But it’s just as easy to pick up again.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford returns with nine profound stories of love and grief , tales that are exhilarating, reflective and intricately coiled as felt life is ... Though coolly narrated, the stories and novels have always been passionately invested in the way people really think inside their murky, fair-to-middling streams of consciousness. The author has a keen ear for the cadences of speech, and he can specify the required tone in a jiffy, mid-sentence, with an alert eye for the slightest nuance ... Ford is an exciting writer, there is no better adjective - you read him wondering all the time what the next paragraph will bring, and you only stop really to re-read certain sentences to savour their peculiar richness.
Like Chekhov, Ford doesn’t write stories that are exercises in the lyrical mode but are bits of fiction that are whatever lengths they need to wrestle their subjects to the ground. The other distinctive thing about these shorter pieces, which often read as novel-like in their range and ambit, is that each has an Irish aspect to their subject matter that seems to reflect Ford’s time at Trinity College Dublin while also hovering around the states of Louisiana and Maine like semi-private fetishes or obsessions ... Grief and love are central to these stories, which show an old master at the height of his powers ... tremendous range and consistency. They have an elasticity that allows Ford to lasso any stray or poignant perception that floats into view. Yes, they are, by design, Irish, New England and Southern, but this deliberate vista of designations contain and disclose worlds.
In Sorry for Your Trouble, the emotional balance tilts towards the characters’ pasts, allowing a weightlessness to pervade the present ... There’s a sense of aftermath and nostalgia to these stories that’s variously wistful or mournful ... Ford’s people live, vacation, have roots and experience epiphanies. Too many of these are of the ho-hum variety ... Narrative thrust is missing from all but one of these tales ... His realism is still best served dirty.
Hazzard is wonderfully attuned to subtle shifts in moods and feelings, particularly when writing dialogue, at which she excels ... her entire work is characterised by a preoccupation with language, beautifully deployed by herself, but often used by her characters in order to deceive themselves or others. She frequently exposes the gap between what people say, particularly when lazily using stock phrases, and what they really mean: ‘Try not to worry,’ a character says in one story, ‘implying that one must by all means worry, though possibly notto distraction.’ ... While the book has been poorly served by its editor, who has not troubled to give a date of publication for any of the stories, the 28 collected here perfectly showcase the elegant prose, emotional intelligence and dark humour that make Hazzard such a pleasure to read.
... nine deeply internalized stories ... Ford himself is in splendid command of these pristine, emotionally intricate, stealthily unnerving, and mordantly funny tales of rupture, loss, and fathoms-deep loneliness. The setups seem predictable, then pitch into surprising and provocative directions. Lawyers abound; New Orleans, Chicago, and New York are the settings; houses embody longings and loss; and conflicts between Irish and American characters are fresh and intriguing. Ford masterminds unforeseen encounters and power shifts to complexly resonant effect ... Once again, virtuoso Ford deftly sails the seas and storms of consciousness.
Though Ford remains most widely heralded for his novels...his story collections have often been almost as cohesive and ambitious. The latest finds the author in his mid-70s writing about men who are also in life’s later stages and who are lost and bewildered by just about everything but the certainty and imminence of death ... Powerfully unsettling stories in which men nearing the end of their lives wonder, befuddled, if that's all there is.
Pulitzer-winner Ford’s middling collection...showcases men experiencing glimmers of epiphanies amid the process of mourning ... Ford’s unrelenting exploration of life’s bleakness and sadness makes these stories enervating, particularly compared to his previous work, though his clear, nuanced prose continues to impress. Ford is a supremely gifted writer, but he’s not at his best here.
