Saturday at the Library
Today the children had an ice cream hangover, and I had a children hangover, so it was with much relief that I left for my usual Saturday getaway at the library. I was productive until the last twenty minutes, when I found myself looking at photos of authors on the jackets of their hardcovers. One wonderful thing about libraries, they tend to get everything in hardcover right when it comes out. Anyway, I was surprised at how attractive Richard Ford’s Bascombe novels were in their first editions—much nicer than the paperbacks that came after them. As for Ford himself, he looks better as he ages. Let us not speak of his mustache on the flap of A Piece of My Heart, which was published the year I was born. But I suppose we shouldn’t blame Ford for the mustache, either. If the photos in my old family albums reflect the trends and styles of that year, Ford’s mustache would have been inconspicuous, at least.
I’m currently reading a collection of Ford’s stories, A Multitude of Sins, which I picked up last weekend at the used book store in Northampton. The first story was good. I didn’t care for the second story, mainly because in it Ford does this thing where his characters say things to each other that do not seem real: people don’t talk like that. But the third story was terrific.
In grad school I missed a chance to see Richard Ford read from A Multitude of Sins, which had just been published, but a friend of mine skipped our seminar to attend the reading and filled me in later. Evidently Ford said something to the effect that, in his fiction, he tries to stay faithful to the details we call reality, even when it comes to geography, but if the cadence of a particular sentence demands some fabrication, he’ll go with what sounds better over what’s technically accurate. I remember my friend telling me this, but I don’t remember the seminar I attended instead of Ford’s reading. Bad call on my part.
A few years ago, Ford read and discussed one of John Cheever’s short stories for a New Yorker podcast, and if you’re into this kind of writing, and maybe even if you aren’t, I recommend listening. It’s a good reading of a good story.
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