A bleak feel for adultery

A single character runs through the fiction of Richard Ford: male, driven by vanity, often sexually unfaithful, fatally detached from all the most important processes in life. He was there, as Frank Bascombe, in The Sportswriter and Independence Day. And he is here, in different guises, in Ford's latest book of stories, A Multitude of Sins.

At first glance, it may seem a bleak vision of manhood, and reading one story after another of weakness and self-deception can take its toll. The themes are similar. In Privacy, a husband waits until his wife is sleeping before spying on a woman undressing in a neighbouring apartment; in Calling, the 15-year-old narrator's father has left New Orleans to elope with another man and his mother is sleeping with the gardener; in Dominion, the adulterous couple get threatening calls from a man claiming to be the cuckolded husband while they are holed up in their satin-plush hotel room. Women, by contrast, appear less deluded, less blind to their own failings, more placid and reasonable and emotionally engaged.

Dark as this vision is - and however all-pervasive the sense that something worse, some wholly unexpected and far bleaker scenario, lurks just around the corner - what hits hardest is the characters' often total absence of any moral radar. Ford's men and women pursue their own ends with apparent disregard for all that they might be destroying. And, while all around them is collapsing, the smallest details stand out.

In Under the Radar, Marjorie tells her husband Steven of her recent affair with a man they are just about to have dinner with; Steven, scarcely reacting, notices the "peepers calling out from the watery lows".

Ford has chosen extreme situations - in one story, an adulterous day trip actually ends in death - and set them against a backdrop of unrelenting, glacial weather, where people "expel soundless breaths into the night".

Were it not for his redeeming humour and characteristic elegant prose, the vision might be too much. Yet, even in damaged relationships, there is tenderness: "He leaned to kiss her cheek, smelled her faint citrus breath." Insights are startling: in Charity, the protagonist, an ex-cop, used to like robberies because "they were biblical". And descriptions of place provoke jolts of recognition, coupled with a certain envy that Ford has managed such accurate coinage: Maine is "small in scale, profusely scenic, annoyingly remote, exclusive and crowded".

Yet, by the end of the book, any lingering sense that Ford has distanced himself from the moral problems of his characters, that he has in fact in some way tacitly endorsed their behaviour, is completely dispelled. After sex, the adulterous couple in Abyss have nothing but insults to trade with each other. In Creche, we read, "Daisy married him - she said - because of his alarmingly big dick. That - or more importantly, the lack of that - was in her view why many other marriages failed". And yet Daisy's marriage - inevitably - has failed too. There surely is, whispers the invisible Ford, another way.