Lost in Translation

During the 1980s, when the Kmart Konvoy of that loose American school of writing called Dirty Realism was driving four abreast and turning the memory of 20th century literature into road kill, Richard Ford rode like a loner. He was American, all right, an all-American writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, after all, for resurrecting Frank Bascombe of “The Sportswriter” in “Independence Day,” an American’s American, a suburban Joe with a set of dilemmas rich enough to give John Updike’s Rabbit a run for his money.

But there was something mythic in Ford’s best writing, something of a high plains drifter in the writer himself, that distanced him from the Tobias Wolffs, the Jayne Anne Phillipses, something that made him seem as un-American as Clint Eastwood.

With the appearance of three of his longer stories in “Women With Men,” the explanation becomes clear. Although the middle story, “Jealous,” inhabits the familiar, chilly Ford plains of Montana, the two outer panels of the triptych, “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals,” are set in an exotic Paris. It is a Paris of dreams, of expectations, a city of exile in an almost classical mode, and a city of death, of the body and, more treacherously, the spirit.

The length and depth of the journey in these novellas--the Paris vignettes are long enough to be vineyards, averaging a hundred pages a piece--raise them above the work of the other Dirties. “Occidentals,” the final piece, is as rich a moral fable as the finest novellas of this century, with overtones of non-American non-realists like Carlos Fuentes, Thomas Bernhard with his repetitions and diversions, the displaced Colombian Alvaro Mutis and even Joseph Conrad.

Charley Matthews of “Occidentals” is a former college professor, a white man who slouched his way into a small Midwestern university by agreeing to teach African American literature and then slouched his way out of academia and marriage by writing a small novel called “The Predicament.” While “The Predicament” has long since vanished from the American scene, a small French publisher is putting out a translation.

Charley makes a pre-Christmas trip to the City of Light with his girlfriend, Helen Carmichael, “a tall, indelicately bony ash-blond woman with a big-breasted, chorus-girl figure” to “have lunch with his French editor . . . take in a museum, eat a couple of incomparable meals, possibly attend the ballet.” In short, Charley has come to visit a Paris designed by a career of reading Flaubert, Hemingway and the chroniclers of the liberated life of the American Negro writers, whose work he has relied upon for his college course.

From the beginning, things go wrong. Blumberg, his editor, wakes Charley out of a jet-lag nap to announce that he is about to fly off to somewhere in the Indian Ocean with his family and must cancel all the plans Charley had imagined, of lunch, of friendship, of mapping out the next novel. The only crumb Blumberg leaves for Charley is an appointment four days hence with Madame de Grenelle, the French translator of “The Predicament.” Resisting the temptation to leave Paris immediately, to go south to the imagined warmth of the Riviera or across the channel to the dreamy spires of Oxford, Charley decides to tough it out.

*

And tough it is. Paris is cold. Helen is ill. She and Charley spend their days hobbling through bits of itinerary, their evenings dining with Americans in steakhouses or conversing in disheartening Japanese restaurants. Sleepless nights find Charley staring out of his airless hotel window, watching homeless men sneak into the Jewish section of the cemetery across the street.

Although it is a different Paris from his dreams, a translated Paris, Charley is not entirely dismayed. Following Helen into stores, standing back while she speaks French, he discovers he enjoys the distance. That his secret reason for coming to Paris is to get outside the center of things, to become lost in translation.

“Listening this way, he made up whole parts and sometimes the entirety of conversations based on an erroneous interpretation of a hand gesture or a facial expression or some act of seemingly familiar body language coupled with a word he thought he knew but was usually also wrong about. It could get to be addictive, he believed, not understanding what people were saying. Time spent in another country would probably always be spent misunderstanding a great deal, which might in the end turn out to be a blessing and the only way you could ever feel normal.”

Charley fails, however, to understand much more than just French, and the other country turns out to be much more than just France. By the time he arrives at his appointment with his translator, his misunderstanding of Helen, while it may be a blessing, has turned fatal. The other country he has been traveling in, another country in which he has failed to understand the language, is the country of Woman.

The “with” of “Women With Men” is an ironic fulcrum. It’s a geographic “with,” a “with” of people sharing a hotel room, a table in a restaurant, the “with” of a grilled cheese with a side of bacon. The men in Ford’s collection--Austin, the paper salesman of “The Womanizer”; Larry, the 17-year-old of “Jealous”; and Charley Matthews--are in their hearts miles away from the women they are with, wandering through the Jewish section of the cemetery, in exile.

Alienation is hardly uncharted territory, nor is the difference between the sexes. Ford has spent time in the forest service of symbols before, most notably in one of his finest stories, “Empire,” written back in 1986. And the men of “The Womanizer” and “Occidentals” are neither older nor wiser than other Ford heroes, just a little wealthier, able to afford transatlantic planes and brasseries instead of Buffet Cars and Brazier Burgers. Nor are these necessarily Ford’s latest visions. “Jealous” was published a few years ago in the New Yorker and “The Womanizer” appeared in Granta in 1992, between the Frank Bascombe novels.

But by sandwiching a good old reliable Ford like “Jealous”--with its bars and its parlor cars, its hard-drinking aunt and its sensitive 17-year-old--between a pair of Paris originals, Ford makes us reevaluate the map of his world. America is the part of our soul we thought we knew and Europe is the part we thought we’d understand, if only we’d taken the Berlitz course in self-knowledge. And Man is everywhere in exile, especially from the Land of Woman, sitting like a side order on his own plate, separated by an expanse of tablecloth, starched and unnavigable.

Book critic Richard Eder is on vacation.