Women With Men [Hardcover]

Richard Ford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1997

In his second collection of short fiction, Richard Ford captures relationships at complex and essential moments of truth — exploring the obscure difference between privacy and intimacy, the fine distinction of pleasing another as opposed to oneself, and the need for reliance tempered by fearful vulnerability. The three stories take us from the plains of Montana, to the streets of Paris, to the suburbs of Chicago.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This audiobook features an unabridged story taken from author Ford's recent collection, Women with Men. As narrator, Ford's voice is melancholic and perfect for evoking the downbeat tone of the work. In brief, a tangle of jealousy erupts among a Montana family, leading directly to the unnecessary death of a total stranger. The telling of the story is enhanced by the program's production values: effective music, good sound quality, and an appropriately somber pace. The story is so subtle that listeners may need to hear it twice to catch a single line in the narrative that is critical for insight into the real cause of the tragic event, never admitted or even spoken by the character responsible for it. A wholly absorbing work for adults.?Mark Pumphrey, Polk Cty. P.L., Columbus, N.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

From Booklist

Ford's novel, Independence Day (1995), won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and there is no question that he is a gifted storyteller, albeit a morose and relentlessly precise one. Here, in three powerful long stories, he explores precarious and complicated relationships between men and women. Each tale revolves around the fractured emotions aroused by the dissolution of a marriage: feelings of failure and the dizzying sense of spinning unsteadily and off course through life, like a wheel without an axle. In "The Womanizer," a man who believes he still loves his wife goes to Paris alone on a business trip and becomes obsessed with a Frenchwoman, an awkward and futile pursuit with a near-disastrous denouement. In "Jealousy," set in a bleak little Montana town, a 17-year-old finds himself skewered on the sharp psyches of his unhappily separated parents and lonely aunt Doris (a wonderful character with a taste for schnapps, a pink Cadillac, and a red dress). Ford returns to Paris in "Occidentals," rendering the city intolerably gray and extremely dangerous to the mental health of its fuzzy-minded American visitors. All of Ford's magnetic characters seem permanently jet-lagged, woozy with displacement and disappointment, and their troubles escalate accordingly, with surreal and sickening inevitability. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 255 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown Company; First Edition edition (1997)
• ISBN-10: 0316286311
• ISBN-13: 978-0316286312
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,386,326 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take Two, November 22, 1999

By 

David Antonelli (Windsor, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Women with Men (Hardcover)

I think this is one of Richard Ford's best along with Wildlife, Rock Springs, and The Ultimate Good Luck. The subject matter and setting are quite different from the Americana we've come to expect from him, yet the depth of insight is there in maybe even more intensity than in any other works. I rank the first story, The Womanizer, up there with more obvious and less subtle works by Camus concerning "the human condition" While some reviwers found the protagonist lacking direction and substance, I felt that this was precisely WHY this story was so good. Ford has managed to portray a character who is non-commital and self-deceptive to the point of ridiculousness. He is an onion skin of lies and apathy floating back and forth between Paris and the US under the illusion that he is having an affair with a woman that he really doesn't care about. There are so many great scenes in here from the one where he imagines himself in court with his wife to when he presents the little boy with a gift. Ford undermines him with irony from start to finish and presents us with incredible detail and insight a character who is fundementally vague and doesn't even know himself let alone others. A classic of the short novel which should be ranked with the best of Peter Handke in this genre. There is a little of this protagonist in all of us. Well done.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Portraits of Depression, October 18, 1998

By 

Thomas Fulton (Minneapolis, Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Women with Men : Three Stories (Paperback)

Richard Ford's Women with Men is a collection of three short stories. The first and third seem closely related. They focus on two men from the Midwest, both entering middle age, and both profoundly confused and clueless. The city of Paris features prominently in both stories. The third, story, much shorter and sandwiched between the Paris tales is a sort of coming of age tale of a teenage boy in Montana. It seems somewhat out of place.

In the first story, "The Womanizer", Martin Austin a supposedly happily married man, has traveled to Paris for a business trip where he finds himself intrigued by a somber, enigmatic woman undergoing a painful divorce. The story chronicles what happens when Austin becomes unaccountably obsessed with her. In the other Paris story, "Occidentals", Charley Matthews, whose wife has recently abandoned him, is visiting Paris on business, accompanied by his lover, Helen. I found both stories painful and dreary but was struck by how congruent Ford's writing style was with the psyche of the characters. Both the characters and the writing are ponderous, and humorless and grim. The result is an unusually intense portrayal of unconscious grief, depression, and delusion and quiet despair among men (and the women in their lives) who are groping for meaning and purpose in a soul-dead existence, and who are floundering for human connection without the slightest capacity for autheticity or intimacy.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An insightful and anxiety-inducing triptych of tales, August 1, 2008

By 

John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Women with Men : Three Stories (Paperback)

There is the selection of stories itself that is interesting. Two are primarily set in Paris, the book ends for one set in Montana. Meaningful design, or whimsy?

In both the stories set in Paris, there is a strong element of American "innocents abroad," traveling out of their depth, with an inchoate sense that Paris will solve the problems of their shallow lives. In the first story, "The Womanizer," the American protagonist, Martin Austin, is nominally a happily married, yet is pulled to a certain "je ne sais quoi" that seems to envelop French women. Ford has a remarkable ability to portray what is Austin's mind, while at the same time depicting the reality that he is oblivious to. At one point Austin sees, sitting in a café, "a man with soiled lapels, in need of a shave and short of cash, scribbling his miserable thoughts into a tiny spiral notebook like all the other morons he's seen who'd thrown their lives away," which is a haunting foreshadowing of the inevitable, tragic denouement of Austin's odyssey - certainly far more tragic than my limited imagination could have predicted.

In the third story, "Occidentals," a "retired" white English professor, who through a fluke, had become a black studies specialist, has taken one of his former students, who is eight years older than him, for their first trip to Paris. She has cancer, and a classic checklist of sights that must be seen. At one point she meets former friends, the true "Ugly Americans" abroad, and they have dinner. They scene is a painful read, for regrettably it is not crude caricature, but an accurate depiction of those who are uncomfortable out of their own narrow cultural norms. Likewise, there is another tragic denouement.

Then, the middle story, "Jealous," would easily fit into his stories entitled "Rock Springs." It is that hard-scrabble existence, along the upper continental divide that is portrayed. A boy is coming of age, his parents are divorced; he is leaving his father, on good terms, to spend time with his mother on the West Coast, and is accompanied by his aunt. The physical and spiritual poverty of their lives is deftly described in classic Ford style.

I used to think this was Ford's finest work, but after the re-read have reduced it to parity with his other classics, Independence Day, etc. I disagree with other reviewers who think these stories are cast-offs from abandoned novels; each is wonderfully complete in itself. I also disagree with another reviewer who thinks these stories are not appropriately set in Paris - it seems to me that they could ONLY occur in Paris. Ford is never a "fun read," and so much the better for it, and at least for this reader, induces anxiety as one sees parts of oneself in these sad tales.