A Review of Richard Ford’s “Sorry for Your Trouble”
Death and Divorce
Several themes populate the stories in Richard Ford’s latest collection, Sorry for Your Trouble. A theme revolving around divorce is one of them — with characters on the edge of not being married, having to spend their nights lonely. (Though I should quickly add here that the odd piece is about being a widower, so there’s another loss of separation, too, that comes into play.) A theme of death is another, as, usually, a character is at the edge of life and is about to die. These things can make Sorry for Your Trouble seem like a depressing book. It is, but there’s also a sense of uplift — that life somehow beats on and will go on well after one has departed the firmament.
When I sit down to write these book reviews, I do so right away after having finished the book. (This is no special occasion.) The reason is that I want to jam as many things as I can remember about the novel or stories down onto the page before I forget any of them. Well, if I can be candid, Sorry for Your Trouble makes me wonder if I should sit with these pieces for a bit. They are the type of stories that you want to think about, and think hard about — these slices of kitchen sink realism. The stories are vivid, and so much so that they tend to not have beginnings or endings — they are as though you have walked into the middle of a life well-lived, and are seeing a tiny sliver of that life play out. That’s why you have to think about them. This is not a criticism, but you may feel that you might have missed something important. (But that these are stories about ordinary people in ordinary times is kind of the point.)
As with all story collections, there are a few that I didn’t enjoy as much — but I can truthfully say that I don’t think there are any outright misfires in the bunch. What helps is a seam of connectivity. Some of the stories are set in New Orleans, while others are in Maine. Others are set in Paris, or mention Paris fleetingly, or are set in Ireland — most of the characters here are Irish. The Richard Ford universe of Sorry for Your Trouble is small and compact, never venturing much beyond these confines until the final story “Second Language” which takes place mostly in New York City, though Idaho makes a cameo. If pressed to name the stories I did like, the general rule of thumb with this collection is, the longer the story, the better it usually is — the more rich and vibrant the telling of the tale when there are many miles to unspool.
“Nothing to Declare,” which opens the collection, is innocent enough. It’s the tale of a late middle-aged man, married, who runs into an old flame in a hotel and spends the better part of an hour with her — with a back-and-forth “what if?” looming large over the proceedings. Will the two kiss or will they find a way to escape life and make love, making up for lost time in the process? It’s ultimately a devasting tale of regret or lack thereof (depending on the character), and sets the rest of the collection off swimmingly. “The Run of Yourself” is a novella a few stories skipped ahead later, and concerns a widower who winds up in a summer house in Maine after his wife has died, and how he heals through contact he has with a younger woman (much younger woman). The only complaint was that this was a novella that had the potential to turn into a novel that wasn’t realized — the story gets going only to abruptly end just when it really starts to get interesting and expansive.
Those are but two of the stories in this collection, and there are other gems. However, I should probably confess something. Even though I turn 45 years old this year, it felt as though these weren’t stories for me. Ford is in his mid-70s, and most of his characters in this collection are in their 50s and beyond. It felt as though I was still too young to fully grasp or understand these vignettes of love and death were all about. This book was probably, in many ways, wasted on me. Still, I found myself moved by a great deal of these tales. Or, if not moved, then mildly curious about the lives of those who populate these tales. Again, not every story captured my interest, and there is a piece with an undeveloped homo-erotic storyline that falls a bit flat, but Ford makes up for this by how he juxtaposes images: a good boy coming from a not-so-good home, a likable young woman who has no friends, a bored Irish schoolteacher who has an exciting lover on the side. Ford lives at the edges of things that turn on themselves, making his stories lively and interesting and will have readers watching for thematic concerns.
Still, I wonder how I would feel about this book if I had waited another day or two, or a week, before penning this review. Would I still remember this book? It’s a question I ask myself because I remember reading, decades ago, a previous novella collection of Ford’s called Women with Men, but cannot, for the life of me, remember anything about it. (Whereas, ask me about portions of Don DeLillo’s Underworld, read in the same timeframe, and I could recount images from that book with picture-perfect recall.) It remains to be seen if Sorry for Your Trouble will have any lasting impact. If it doesn’t, maybe I’ll need to wait 10 years and try to read it again. After all, I am not the target demographic for this book, meaning that this is something I’ll have to grow into in some respects. Still, for now, and for where I am, I enjoyed Ford’s masterful storytelling. He has a knack for life’s endings, even if it is at a kitchen table with your head in your hands and no further sign that the end was near. Yes, that’s an insider’s reference to this collection, and you’ll just have to read this book to see what I mean.
Richard Ford’s Sorry for Your Trouble will be published by Ecco on May 12, 2020.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
