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mismatch of style and subject.
The writers who best reflected Carver's vIsion were those who
shared his regional, lower-class background, his feeling for the unhappy
lives of ordinary Americans. Two of the most promising to emerge in
the 1980s were Richard Ford, who came from Mississippi, and Russell
Banks, who grew up in New Hampshire. Before American literature was
urbanized, writers who escaped from the small towns and provincial
Midwestern cities had always written with a mixture of sympathy and
horror about the worlds that produced them, the Winesburg, Ohios, and
Gopher Prairies. More recently John Updike in his Rabbit novels,
Bobbie Ann Mason in
Shiloh and Other Stories,
and Joyce Carol Oates
(in
Marya
and other works set in western New York) showed how
powerfully they could imagine the joyless lives that might easily have
entrapped them back home. But Richard Ford in
Rock Springs,
a brilliant
collection of related stories mostly set in his adopted Northwest, came
closest to matching Carver on his own ground.
This is straight Carver country: as men go off hunting and fishing,
and come back drunken and violent, we see marriages disintegrating,
people drifting apart, children losing all contact with parents. A mood
of ineffable sadness infuses these stories, as in Ford's best-known novel,
The Sportswriter
(1986). The novel is a long, slow work in which very
little happens, a book whose hero suffers from depressive fits of
"dreaminess" which are only dispelled toward the end, when he begins
to give up his secret mourning for his lost child, his dead marriage, his
aborted career as a writer. Until then, Ford's alter ego clings to the sur–
face of the familiar as a refuge from depression. When a friend kills him–
self he is puzzled. "He could've hunted up a reason to keep breathing,"
he thinks. "What else is the ordinary world good for except to supply
reasons not to check out early."
The relentless yet lyrical banality of
The Sportswriter
-
which re–
minded me of the quietly desperate musings ofWalker Percy's 1961 novel
The Moviegoer
-
is the very definition of the contemporary pursuit of the
ordinary. Yet Ford shrewdly makes this cheery suburban emptiness part of
his hero's problem, his defensive mask, something he must begin to put
behind him.
In
Rock Springs
(and its companion piece, the short novel
Wildlife)
Ford evokes the ordinariness of his characters' lives in a different way, as
if he were shaping a myth around it. Unlike Carver, who avoided all
'literary' flourishes, Ford treats these people as if they were the material
of legend. At his worst Ford strains too hard for a resonant simplicity; he
can sound like the Old Man of the Mountain, imparting folk-wisdom
around a cracker-barrel. But Ford also restores the lyricism Carver
mercilessly pruned from his early stories. The speaker in Ford's fiction is
