The celebrated short story writer Richard Ford has again assembled an incisive collection of stories exploring the intimate, often epiphanic, moments between men and women and their relationships in love. His new collection, \A Multitude of Sins"" weaves together 10 disparate stories by exploring the overarching human tendencies of couples involved in adulterous affairs. Though Ford makes his statement collectively by unifying his stories with this particular thematic structure, his observations are independently subtle, using the smallness and the quiddities of his characters to point to something universal.
Still, these are stories about men cheating on their wives and women cheating on their husbands. Their power comes from Ford's ability to rotate the angles, adjusting the weight of consequence. From a confrontation between a newlywed couple, alone in a car on the side of a bucolic New England road, which ultimately turns chillingly violent, to a middle aged man's accidental encounter with the husband of a woman he had had a brittle affair with years ago, the stories indicate that there is no exactness to the ramifications that these acts engender. In these stories, adultery is both heartbreaking and removed; a natural consequence of time and a bizarre realization that time has been wasted. The absurdity of these situations oftentimes comes, not from the man or woman directly involved, but from the peripheral characters - bosses, friends and children. The oblivious are never quite oblivious, unless they chose to be, and that in itself is a paradox.
Unlike his last collection of stories (""Rock Springs""), ""A Multitude of Sins,"" although hewn together in theme, is amazingly far reaching in its geography. Ford seems somewhat omniscient in his ease of description; locales ranging from New Orleans, to Grand Central Station, to St. Louis, to Maine'even touching down once in Montreal. His eye for landscape is almost as punctilious as his eye for character, a thorough unearthing of the hidden, the subtle hints of a place that bring out its charm, its peculiarity in the eyes of a single person. Indeed, location seems to be as amorphous (beneath its physical exterior) as the denizens who walk its landscape, each building, home and sidewalk is an accumulation of memory and association.
This is in stark contrast to characters whose focus is material in a sense, according to Ford's accent on their affluence. He has strayed from the turpitude and the bareness of Montana (his focus in ""Rock Springs"") and shown a world of the upwardly mobile, even luxurious. ""A Multitude of Sins"" presents the lives of businessmen, lawyers, painters and AIDS benefit organizers; there are French doors, courtyards, expensive coats, hats and SUVs. The underprivileged are not a force entering into these character's lives, and money is treated as such an overtly indifferent commodity, that the unrest so prevalent in these stories seems correlative to a mentality where nothing is out of reach. The rug is never truly pulled from underneath these characters without the prospect of replacing it with one of equal or greater value.
Ford's ease and beauty of language is once again breathtaking. His characters exist in places that seem almost too personal, as if language itself is trespassing in the lives of his characters. And still, Ford is simplistic in his narrative; a storyteller, in this case, recounting acts of love and betrayal.
