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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Million Miles From Home, September 30, 2000
This review is from: Rock Springs (Paperback)
Rock Springs is a million miles from home if home ever existed in the first place. Home is dead, demolished, forever lost. Richard Ford knows more than he lets on. He tells interviewers that he only imagines the lives of his characters, and knows nothing of them--looks upon them from the outside. And why wouldn't he be telling the truth? After all, he is a card carrying member of The Literati. He rides the circuit, does readings, and swims with academics. Still, for some reason, Ford can't help but write about people spun loose from everyday life. His characters are always on the run or are the victims of irrevocable mistakes and tragic events. It's an arid and empty place high up in the attic of the mind where Ford takes his readers. His books aren't for everyone. Readers who feel the need for warm loving characters engaged with life and living in the bosom of the family won't understand Richard Ford. He takes us to a place where a person is most alone and then exposes us to the achingly lost world of spirtual isolation. Rock Springs is populated by loss and alienation against a backdrop of achingly beautiful every day life. Ford's protagonists are continually immersed in a transitory form of immediate experience, and continually offer themselves up to the dark seduction of fate. The magic of these stories is that they are told from the point of view of people overwhelmed by the cascade of events in their lives. Every sentence is immaculate in its spare purpose. Ford is no mere storyteller. Ford is an immense talent and Rock Springs is a must read.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
America's Best Short Story Writer, July 24, 1997
By A Customer
This review is from: Rock Springs (Paperback)
Simply put, Richard Ford is the finest writer of short fiction in America today. When first published in the 1980s, Rock Springs did not get the attention it rightly deserved, but since Ford has won the Pulitzer, this collection is once again being sapped up.
This collection outweighs Ford's lates - Women With Men - because it has that one base ingrediant the other lacks: a heart. Ford tells a series of stories about the great American vastness and the sense of hopelessnes that seems to permeate much of the West.
In doing so, Ford evokes character just as memorable as any in contemporary literature - including his own Frank Bascomb. This collection is a must read for aspiring writers who want to know how to create emotion without melodrama. Also, it creates voices rather
than imitating them. A mark of a true master. When I first read this collection in college, it seemed like I was sitting around the fire listening to a storyteller. The characters are vibrant, the setting as gritty as they need to be, and the writing as polished
as fine silver. Purchase this book and understand what the word "mastery" means.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sweet, wise, honest, March 15, 2002
This review is from: Rock Springs (Paperback)
There is something sweet and wise and honest in these stories, in even in their apparent lack of sentimentality. There is a feeling for Flaubert's 'fundamental accuracy of detail,' a feeling for raw moments of honest life. Without moralizing or drying up there are moments here when we understand life as it is, perhaps not as we want it to be. In this brilliant collection and its accompanying addendum, the novella Wildlife, which Ford told me was the extension, the last getting out of the idea, there is such tender honesty, and raw facts particularly showing the moments his teenage male protagonists realize their parents are flawed pained people striving for things, not getting there, doing what they say is wrong, living life, and that is what life is. Optomists breaks my heart.
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