With the publication of his third novel, The Sportswriter (1986), Richard Ford from Jackson, Mississippi, and already heir to a rich tradition, asserted his claim to the title of a great American writer. On the publication of its sequel, Independence Day, some seven years later, that claim has become his rightful property. Those two novels represent not just the contrasting stages in a man's life, from bewildered and lost, to knowing and accepting, but there are also the insights and perceptions Ford brings to describing, perhaps even defining, the changing face of a diverse country that is no longer quite as young as it once was, nor quite as hopeful.
The Sportswriter made him famous; Independence Day won him the Pulitzer Prize. In between he has published the gentle elegy, Wildlife (1991), and many fine stories. A Multitude of Sins, his third collection, brings the now familiar Ford voice of the older, wised up narrator-as-observer a few stages further on, not only from Independence Day but from the remarkable trio of narratives contained in Women With Men (1997).
It is not that the Bascombe character features in any of these stories but the shrewd, all seeing intelligence of a storyteller who knows his country and who certainly understands people, their hopes, dreams, mistakes and, above all, their sins, testifies to exactly how well Ford has watched and listened; reflected upon and learnt.
In the process of telling stories, looking at lives, he has created a wholly American literary language, shaped by the rolling, laconic cadences of his native South with its specific prose rhythms combined with the blunt candour of a culture priding itself on directness served as a form of courage or at least honour.
Rock Springs (1988), his first volume of short stories, has, deservedly, been hailed as one of the finest collections published in the US in the 20th century. Those 10 stories with their themes of search and survival present a cast of marginalised characters, the walking wounded of cheap motels and freeways desperate to find something, as anything would have to be that bit better.
The protagonists in the new stories are also searching. Yet there is an essential difference. In the title story of Rock Springs, the narrator in the act of selecting his next stolen car, asks, ". . . what would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? . . . Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you." The characters in the new stories have jobs and are respectable, they are not losers on the run from their situations, but they're all fleeing themselves.
In 'Abyss', the longest story, a couple buoyed up by success selling houses engage in an affair that ends badly at the Grand Canyon. Elsewhere, a woman in a hotel room decides the only way to prove an affair had any meaning is to end it with some drama. A couple try to save a ruined marriage with a short break in Maine that helps highlight the difficulty of living a real life. A perfect couple almost experience a breakdown with the arrival of an unlovable stray pup. These are tough, even harsh stories; all of them are about relationships and each of them is marked by Ford's languid, clear-eyed irony.
'Reunion', his tense, precise homage to John Cheever, could be the best in a book of strong narratives, several of which have echoes of Cheever. In it, the Bascombe-like narrator notices the husband of his former lover crossing the concourse of Grand Central Station. A strange impulse makes the narrator intent on speaking to the man he last met in a brawl in a St Louis hotel room. Mack Bolger, waiting for his young daughter, does not wish to engage with a man who had such an impact on his life. For the narrator the encounter causes him to relive the affair. He also remembers his former lover remarking after it was over, "We were so close for a little while . . . You and me, I mean. Now, I feel like I'm telling all this to an old friend . . ."
Survival remains his theme, and this time survival strongly undercut by sex or rather, the hopes and fears it represents. The sins in these sad, human stories are mostly about fear of failing, of being alone, and most of all, of trying to love.
Ford is a master, coming ever closer to the heart of his country, having already captured its voice.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times